


Wasteland, Baby!

by jacenbren



Series: Wasteland, Baby! Saga [DISCONTINUED INDEFINITELY] [1]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Star Wars Original Trilogy, Voltron: Legendary Defender, Warriors - Erin Hunter
Genre: 80's Music, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Altean OCs, Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Petra, Brain Damage, Dark Magic, Denial of Feelings, Descent into Madness, F/F, F/M, Falling In Love, Fanfiction of Fanfiction, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Ghosts, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Loss of Limbs, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Non-binary character, OCs - Freeform, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Suicidal Thoughts, Temporary Amnesia, bamf Aiden, buckle the fuck up my dudes, evil ghosts, it’s not gay if it’s on the moon, i’m back on my bullshit everybody, profanity warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-01-03 10:16:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 48
Words: 61,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21177776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jacenbren/pseuds/jacenbren
Summary: It’s been almost four years since Jesse defeated the Admin, since Petra left Beacontown. She hasn’t said a word to him since, not a single letter or email or anything, which is part of the reason why he’s so surprised when she shows up with a metal arm and some alarming news.Of course, after being alive for twenty-four years, Jesse’s seen some weird shit, so he’s not exactly fazed by the whole concept of alternate realities. The only problem is, someone Petra escaped from is going to destroy all realities everywhere very soon.And apparently, Jesse, Petra, Lukas, and a handful of others are the only ones who can stop her.What could possibly go wrong?





	1. The Arrival

Jesse scowled at the mountain of paperwork on his desk. 

It was moments like these when he wished he’d left with Petra after the whole Admin Debacle almost… hell, how long, almost four years ago?

He hated doing paperwork at ungodly hours in the morning like this. 

He sighed, taking a sip of coffee, and continued to look through the paper on top, which was  _ another _ complaint filed about Ivor’s lava spewing house. Jesse groaned, massaging his forehead. 

Sure, the sentiment he felt towards the old man let him overlook lots of annoying little things, but lately, it was starting to get on his nerves. 

Not that he didn’t like Ivor being back in town. The man had gotten married to Harper three years ago, and now they had a baby girl named Ella.

Jesse tossed the paper in the shredder, and continued sorting. 

He’d managed to filter almost all of the junk mail out of the stack, and started on reading and signing a pile of building permits when the door to his office suddenly banged open.

Jesse yelped, almost spilling his coffee in his lap.

“Jesse!” Radar shrieked, a frantic look on his boyish, nineteen-year-old face, his glasses askew. “Jesse, we need you at the main entrance! Fast!”

Jesse froze. “What happened?” 

If it was one of his friends… 

“It’s Petra,” Radar blurted. “She came through the gates a few minutes ago, hurt, yelling about something. More specifically, you.”

<~>

He realized something was wrong as soon as he saw her. 

Petra was limping frantically in erratic circles, dressed in muddy, blood-stained clothes. Her skin was ashen, sickly grey, and there was a sizable cut on her forehead, as well as several stab wounds in her side and thigh. A thin line of blood ran down her cheek from the corner of her mouth, and her eyes were sunken, but that wasn’t the creepy part. 

The creepy part was her arm. 

From her shoulder down, her right arm had been replaced by what looked like a flawlessly sculpted metal prosthetic, made of nearly seamlessly attached steel plating. The metal was nicked, scratched, and just as muddy as the rest of her. At first glance, her hand appeared to be a silvery cast of a regular human hand, with perfectly articulated joints and fingers, even fingertips.

“Holy shit,” Jesse muttered. 

Then Petra saw him. 

“Jesse!” She shouted, staggering towards him, a frantic look in her eyes. 

Jack, who’d been trying to console her, yelped in surprise and quickly moved in between them. 

“Petra, be rational,” the older man was saying. 

Petra just shoved past him. 

Jesse froze, spotting the huge, lightning bolt-shaped scar on her forehead that almost seemed to glow in the moonlight. Her eyes were wide and bloodshot, filled with terror. 

“Petra?” He asked hesitantly. “Petra, are you okay? What’s hap—“

Petra let out an agonized screech, tripping over her own feet and crumpling onto the road. 

“Changing!” She barked, slamming her metal fist onto the bricks. 

Jesse jumped back in alarm as the brick she’d punched cracked into three pieces. “Petra, what’s going on?” He asked again, wincing at the sight of her bleeding wounds. 

“Everything’s going to change!” Petra gasped. “They’re coming. He’s coming for—for—“

Jesse felt a sickening jolt in his gut. 

“Who’s coming?” He asked, a sense of urgency growing. He had a bad feeling that whatever Petra had seen was going to be crucial. 

Petra let out a weak moan of pain, clutching the wounds in her side. 

“Petra, who’s coming?” He repeated. 

Suddenly, Petra snapped upright, a frenzied, deranged look on her face, and before Jesse could react, she’d grabbed his collar and dragged him close. Her breathing was rough and labored, and smelled like stale, day-old beef. 

“Run,” she wheezed. “He’s coming to kill you. The phoenix. The phoenix is back. The phoenix! It’s gonna burn! Everything ch—ch—“

Her eyes rolled back in her head and she passed out. 

Jesse just stared at her limp body in confusion and shock for a few seconds, trying to process what she’d just said. 

_ Phoenix? _

“We need a medic!” Jack yelled. 


	2. Waking Up

“Yeah, we still haven’t figured it out.”

Jesse glanced over at the door, where Lukas was standing, holding a wad of bandages. He looked tired, and his rubber gloved hands were crusted with blood and dirt. His hair was unkempt and messy, blond curls spilling over his forehead.

Their eyes met for a few moments too long.

The last few months for them had been, well, complicated. After Aiden had shown up again, asking for a chance to redeem himself, Jesse had had an argument with Lukas. Jesse didn’t trust Aiden, and he never had, but Lukas had had his heart set on letting him stay in Beacontown. 

They hadn’t spoken candidly for a while now. 

Jesse awkwardly cleared his throat. “I was in my room with a stack of paperwork,” he said. “What the hell happened out there?”

Lukas winced. “I was up on one of the walls, helping the archers get rid of some stray creepers, and she just comes staggering out of the woods, screaming her head off.”

Jesse glanced back at Petra’s cot. She was asleep, her chest gently rising and falling in time with her heart monitor. Her wounds had been bandaged, and her mud-caked, bloodstained clothes had been replaced by a soft cotton hospital gown. 

Aside from the scar and the metal arm, she almost looked like regular old Petra.

“We were lucky to get her here in time, Lukas said quietly. “She lost a lot of blood. Needed an immediate transfusion. Any longer, and she’dve died by now.”

Jesse scoffed. “Way to lighten the mood, man.”

Lukas just sighed dismally. 

Jesse thought back to what Petra had been rambling about. Something about a phoenix. He’d heard fairy tales about phoenixes, that they were birds that burst into flames when they died and were reborn from the ashes, but he didn’t know what a mythical bird had to do with Petra and her mysterious metal arm. 

She’d also said  _ someone  _ was coming back. That was unnerving, mostly because Jesse knew a lot of people who’d gladly kill him on sight. 

What if… 

No. 

“I… ah… Jesse, can I show you something?” Lukas suddenly asked, jarring him out of his thoughts. 

“Sure,” Jesse said. 

“I found this…  _ thing _ stuck in one of Petra’s stab wounds,” Lukas explained, holding out his hand. Sitting in his palm was what looked like a small dart. It was metal; a plain, dull grey and rather nondescript; with a sharp needle point; but there was something inscribed on the side of it. 

Jesse squinted, trying to make out the small symbol. A tiny etching of a falcon, or maybe a crow?

“There’s something carved on it,” he said. “A symbol or something. Looks like a bird of some kind.”

Lukas raised his eyebrows, putting the dart back in his pocket. 

Suddenly, over on the cot, Petra gasped and sat up, glancing around wildly before scowling and giving her arm a disdainful look. 

“Shit,” she hissed. 

“Petra!” Jesse gasped, rushing over and grabbing another healing potion off the counter. “Are you okay? Where the hell have you been that got you so banged up?”

Petra wrinkled her nose. “Easier to say where I _haven’t_ been,” she muttered. “Hell, am I back in Beacontown? What’s the date?”

Jesse frowned. That was a bizarrely specific question, but he pulled out his phone anyway. 

Lukas, however, has beaten him to the punch. “It’s October third,” he said. 

“What year?” Petra asked. 

There was an awkward pause. 

Jesse glanced at Lukas, who just looked confused. Something was up here, and obviously they both knew it. 

“What year?” Petra demanded, a little more forcefully this time. 

“2019,” Jesse said, his suspicion still rising. “Why do you ask?”

Petra laughed, yanking the IV out of her arm with a grimace, and tried to get up off her cot. 

“Hey!” Lukas yelped. “Sit back down; you almost bled out!”

“We don’t have time,” Petra hissed. “We have days, guys. Just  _ days _ until reality as we know it gets destroyed.”

Jesse froze. None of this made sense.

“Yeah, you heard me,” Petra spat. “Days before a crazy lady tries to open a portal, which is gonna create a rupture in space and time that’ll destroy everything in existence.”

There was another awkward pause. 

Then Petra looked right at him, an unnerving look in her fiery blue eyes. 

“And you know who she needs in order to do it?” She continued. “Us.”


	3. The First Step

“Run that by me again, but slower this time,” Jesse said, staring at Petra in confusion. 

They were sitting in the lounge, eating crackers. Lukas had hooked Petra back to her IV, and she was standing in front of a whiteboard with an elaborate diagram scribbled on it. 

Lukas, who was writing in his notebook, looked perplexed. He was frowning and staring at the board, his lips pursed in that maddeningly adorable way… 

_ Shit! _

Jesse quickly shoved the thoughts out of his mind. He’d long since felt confused and irritated by this odd feeling he got around Lukas. He’d finally admitted to himself that yeah, it  _ was _ a crush, but there was no way he was going to approach Lukas about it. 

He’d resigned himself to pushing the feelings down and trying to ignore them.

“Okay,” Petra said, tapping the center of the web-like diagram. “Time starts here, in this tiny point. However, you know that there are thousands of possible choices for everyone literally every millisecond, right? Like they say, a butterfly flapping its wings can create a tornado miles away with that tiny ripple of air. So in order to accommodate the fact that there are billions of possible outcomes in any given situation, depending on the variables, time splits when a choice is made, creating billions upon billions of realities, all connected at some point, all stretching off into their own separate timelines.”

“What do you mean by ‘connected?’” Lukas asked. 

Petra grinned. “That’s where it gets interesting,” she said. 

Jesse winced. For them, the word “interesting” had sort of started to mean something along the lines of “extremely dangerous-slash-deadly.”

“Anyway,” Petra continued. “Like I said, there are billions and trillions of realities already existing. You see, when something happens that changes the future of the timeline, it splits off, like this,” she said, picking up a marker and drawing a new line off one of the original ones. “Thus, creating a brand-new timeline that stems off the original, deviated by the choice. And there are so many out there, literally  _ anything _ is possible. For example—“

Petra paused, grunting as she dragged her IV rack over to the table. 

“There’s one where something as major as a third world war happened,”she said excitedly. “Or as minor a deviation as Lukas grabbing Cheetos instead of crackers, or where my stab wound is an inch to the left! You get it?”

Jesse realized that he in fact  _ did _ get it. 

“So what’s up with the whole crazy lady thing?” Jesse asked. 

Petra frowned. “Right, her,” she grumbled. “This lady has been searching for a way to traverse between timelines for years. The thing is, it’s dangerous. If you’re in a different timeline, one wrong move, and you could destroy a hundred timelines, or create a hundred new ones, which could tear holes in the fabric of reality because you aren’t supposed to be there. _Especially_ if you stay in said different reality for too long. But there are a few individuals who are capable of traveling between without much damage, and the Phoenix Group calls them constants, or cons for short, because a version of them exists in every timeline ever, in roughly the same time frame. They pop up every couple of centuries, and, well, most of them never ever do it, mostly because they never find out. I’m a con, and so are you two.”

Jesse tried to process the information he’d just received. Not only were alternate realities  _ real,  _ but apparently he could travel between them. 

This was alarming. 

“This lady isn’t a con, though,” Petra said. “Her name is Arai, and I lost my arm after accidentally transversing for the first time about two years ago. She saved my life and built me a new arm, and I worked with her for a while, helping her recruit cons from every reality I could go to. Then I realized she was a real bitch, so I had to get out of there fast.”

“That explains the stab wounds,” Jesse remarked. “What’s her plan?”

“Arai wants to find a perfect reality,” Petra explained. “Bad shit happened in hers. Her best friend was a con. He died, along with a lot of her friends. So far, she’s been recruiting as many cons as she can get in contact with, one of them being a guy named Leo who I am  _ not _ fond of. She’s been building herself an army, and they call themselves the Phoenix Group. Arai herself wants to find a way for her, a variable, to travel directly to said perfect reality, because otherwise she’d probably spend months hopping through the ones close to each other. This will rip the fabric of space and time apart and literally delete existence as we know it, which I tried to explain to her, but of course she didn’t listen to me.”

“So we need to stop her?” Lukas asked. 

Petra nodded. “I know which reality she’s in, but we’ll have to pass through a few. I’ll show you what I mean.”

<~>

“We’re gonna be gone for a while, buddy,” Jesse said, handing his lanyard of keys to Radar.

“Do you know when you’ll be back?” The boy fretted. “Should I be worried?”

Jesse chuckled to himself, checking over his armor one last time and then swinging his backpack onto his shoulders. “Just take it easy,” he said. “I trust you with our town. Try not to fight too much with Stella, okay?”

Radar laughed nervously, brushing his hair back. “Don’t worry about it, boss.”

Jesse chuckled. He liked that kid. After all, he’d been able to take on mutated monsters in Romeo’s maze with no armor while armed with nothing but a shield at the age of sixteen. 

Granted, that was the age Jesse had been when he’d destroyed the Wither Storm, but the kid definitely had courage. 

“You ready to go?” Lukas asked, falling into step beside him. 

“Pretty much,” Jesse replied. “You?”

Lukas nodded. “I just think this is fucking crazy,” he said. “I mean, like, just hours ago, alternate realities were only theoretical physics and quantum theory, and now we’ve got concrete proof they exist? It’s… it’s fascinating.”

Jesse grinned. Part of him missed their easy conversations. 

“Yeah, it’s mind-blowing,” he said. “I mean, Petra, of all people, being the scientist of the group? Who would’ve guessed?” 

“Oh, there you are!” Petra said, a grin spreading across her face. “Here’re your time dials, made of Balmeran crystal. It’s like an anchoring system that you clip on your belt so that we all stay together and don’t pop into the next reality a couple thousand years apart.”

She handed them both a strange bluish crystal belt buckle-looking thing. 

Then he noticed the absence of a buckle on Petra’s belt. 

“Where’s yours?” He asked. 

“Don’t need one,” she said. “I have one in my arm, so I can pop in and out whenever I feel like it. Now, are y’all ready to go?”

“I guess,” Jesse said, taking in Lukas’s slow nod. 

“Alright then,” Petra said, held out her metal arm, closed her eyes in concentration, and then slashed her hand down, sending a shimmering burst of brilliant white light from where her hand had been. 

“Bam,” Petra concluded. “Portal.” Then she walked through it, dissolving into the bright white light. 

There was an awkward pause as they all stared at the  _ literal hole in space. _

“After you,” Lukas said, breaking the silence. 

Jesse shrugged. “See you on the other side,” he said, and, squaring his shoulders, stepped through the rift.


	4. Another Step

He emerged into a void of lightning. 

Jesse yelped, stumbling backwards and falling unceremoniously on his ass. He hadn’t been expecting an invisible floor that seemed to be suspended over a dark nothingness webbed with multicolored streaks of light.

He heard a laugh. 

He glanced up, and there was Petra, maybe fifteen feet above him, seemingly standing on nothing. 

“Space is wonky here!” She shouted. “If you focus, you can pretty much walk anywhere, even up and down!”

There was a startled yelp, and bright flash, and then Lukas was lying on the ground next to him, looking slightly overwhelmed. 

“Oh, no,” Lukas squeaked. “This is bad. My vertigo doesn’t like this.”

Jesse stood slowly. “Woah,” he murmured, glancing around. The nearest streak of light, up near Petra, was more like a stream of light up close. It glowed bright white, but flashes of color occasionally flickered through it. 

He took a deep breath, and put a foot up, like he was going up a staircase. 

To his surprise, it worked. There seemed to be solid ground under his feet, even though he couldn’t see it. 

He grinned. 

“Fuck, this is trippy,” he heard Lukas mumble, from where he was seemingly walking up into thin air. 

After they made it to Petra, Jesse realized that the stream of light wasn’t just a stream of light. As he gazed at it, he realized he could see images flickering briefly through it. 

A woman with braided brown hair facing down an enormous black lion. 

A man with a glowing sword. 

Spears clashing on a battlefield. 

“I’ve passed through this one several times,” Petra said. “I’m pretty good friends with the version of me here, mostly because she used to be affiliated with Arai, but she broke it off. Her name is Phoebe. We need to pick up her friend, Jean, because he’s good with shit like this. Just don’t ask about this reality’s version of Axel. It’s a sensitive topic.”

“Why?” Lukas asked. 

“Well, in this one, he’s dead, and Feeb doesn’t like talking about it.”

“Oh.” 

Jesse winced. He couldn’t imagine losing Axel. In fact, Axel was so big and strong he couldn’t really imagine him dying at all. 

He decided not to pry. 

“Let’s go,” Petra said. “Just step in it.”

“Yeah, this place is  _ really  _ disorienting,” Lukas added. 

Jesse sighed and stepped into the light. 

<~>

He landed in a small kitchen. 

The slender dark-skinned man, clad in nothing but a t-shirt, boxer shorts, and what looked like a chest harness, let out a startled shriek and yanked two swords out of said harness, flinging Cheerios at him. 

“Woah, hey!” Jesse yelped, backing away from the cruel blades. 

“Who in the name of StarClan are you, and  _ where _ did you come from?” The man spat, brandishing his swords. He was tall and skinny but muscular, his hair dark brown and streaked with white. His eyes were almost disproportionately large, and they were a dark amber color. Oddly enough, his pupils were slitted, like a cat’s. There were strange facial tattoos below his eyes, and his fingernails looked almost like claws. 

And there was his weird Austrailian accent that reminded Jesse of a crocodile hunter.

Jesse held up his hands. “I’m with someone named Petra,” he said, trying to step out of the way of the man’s swords. 

The stranger scowled. “Pe—“

He was cut off by a flash of light, and then Petra landed on top of him. 

“Oh, hey Hawkfrost!” She said, rolling off him. “How are Brambleclaw and Mothwing? And does Lionblaze still have that Magic 8 Ball, because I want to ask it some questions.”

Then Lukas popped into existence, crashing face first onto the counter.

“Mother _ fucker!”  _ He groaned. 

Then Jesse saw how the stranger (who must’ve been Hawkfrost), who’d been struggling to his feet, had caught a single glimpse of Lukas and had frozen like he’d seen a ghost. 

_ “Luis?”  _ He gasped. 

“His name’s Lukas,” Jesse said. 

“No, his name was Luis,” Hawkfrost snapped, bristling. 

“Shit!” Petra blurted. “This is the timeline where  _ Lukas _ was the one who destroyed Sky City and threw a whole set of timelines into intergalactic war! Fuck! I thought that was the other one!”

Jesse stopped cold. 

_ What? _

He was still relatively new to the whole multiple timelines existing thing anyway, but the news that Lukas had tried to kill him in this one? Shocking  _ and _ scary.

And in this timeline, Lukas had started an  _ intergalactic war? _

Also shocking and scary. 

Lukas seemed to have drawn the same conclusion, because he looked sickened and terrified. 

“What the  _ hell?” _ Jesse demanded, his frustration finally boiling over. “Petra, what did you get us into?”

Petra, who was picking cereal out of her hair, winced. “Long story,” she sighed. “In this timeline, we aren’t very different, person-wise, but a lot of us have switched rolls, I guess. There are a lot of timelines where Aiden was so bitter and petty that he didn’t try to redeem himself, and in some of those he breaks out of New Sky City and… yeah. Starts an intergalactic war that kills hundreds of millions. Only in this timeline, it deviates from ours much earlier, because Lukas was the one who got jealous and tried to kill you. He broke out of prison, started the war, and… died, in this timeline.”

Jesse just stared at her. 

“Yeah, and when Jean went rogue and started killing people while he was under Mapleshade’s control, Luis was the only thing that kept him from killing Aidan,” Hawkfrost remarked. “As much as I hated that miserable fleabag, he saved my friends’ lives.”

Jesse glanced over at Lukas, who was just lying on the counter, staring at the ceiling in shock. 

He winced. 

The poor guy was probably having a nervous breakdown, and Jesse certainly didn’t blame him.


	5. Duplicates

An hour later, they were in a conference room.

Jesse frowned at the young woman who ran up to Petra and high-fived her. The two looked uncannily similar, except that Fake Petra was several inches shorter and had brown eyes instead of blue, her hair was more of a dark auburn than ginger, and her freckles were much more prominent.

“This is Phoebe,” Petra said. “Me! But, like, a different version of me.”

“I’m Jesse,” Jesse said, and held out his hand. “I’m a con. Do you have a guy here that looks like me?”

Phoebe narrowed her eyes.

Jesse suddenly felt very uncomfortable as she looked him up and down, scowling.

“You sure do look like him, alright,” she grumbled.

“Who’s he?” Jesse asked.

Phoebe winced. 

“My friend Jean,” she explained. “Or ex-friend, I guess. After the war ended, he cut himself off from everybody, and won’t answer no matter what I do. Letters, emails, phone calls, holos, even Iris-messages. He’s somehow figured out how to block all of that, and it’s  _ really _ pissing me off.”

Jesse resisted the urge to back up a few steps.

“Anyhow,” Phoebe continued. “In this reality, a huge, intergalactic war happened. Shit went down, people died. I took over leading Beacontown after Jean ran off. I think I can still help you directly, but I know for a fact that if that little shit gets his ass back here, he can.”

In the back of the room, Hawkfrost, who was lounging across a rolling chair and was for some reason eating a can of Fancy Feast cat food, made a face. 

“Bad idea, mate,” he said. “The last time I saw Jean, he was sitting in his bathtub, listening to Queen on a Walkman and eating french fries. Then, when I tried to talk to him, he  _ very rudely _ threw his underwear at me and yelled at me to scram.”

“Maybe don’t walk in on him while he’s in his underwear,” Phoebe grumbled. 

Petra snorted. “Hah, underwear.”

“So Phoebe knows?” Lukas said anxiously. “She knows about all this?”

Petra nodded enthusiastically. “She was affiliated with Arai for a while, like I said.”

“I decided to get the hell out of there after I found out who she employed,” Phoebe added. “Leo.”

Jesse didn’t know why, but for some reason the way she said that name had an unnerving feel to it. He didn’t know if it was his intuition or something else, but whatever it was, he had a feeling something was up.

“Who’s Leo?” He asked.

Petra’s jaw clenched, and Phoebe flinched.

“He’s an alternate version of Luis,” Hawkfrost said through a mouthful of cat food. “Or Lukas, as you know him. He’s the one who turned bad, like in our timeline, but the war never happened because no one in that reality went to try and stop him. He killed his timeline’s version of Aidan in an attempt on their Jean’s life. Frankly, Jean in that timeline disappeared shortly after that, and to this day, no one has been able to find them. There’s a sneaking suspicion they’re dead.”

“Okay, I know this is totally unrelated,” Jesse said, trying to stay calm as the absurdity and terror he felt threatened to overtake him. “But why the hell are you eating  _ cat food?” _

Hawkfrost snorted. “I’m a Feli. We’re changelings. We can turn into cats, as you call them, at will, but we do experience side effects such as craving fish, or falling asleep in sunny spots.”

“He once chased a laser pointer for ten minutes straight,” Petra added. “It was really fucking funny.”

Hawkfrost smiled cheerfully and lovingly extended his middle finger in her direction.

Petra smirked.

Lukas cleared his throat.

Jesse winced. Lukas looked like he was on the verge of another nervous breakdown.

“So, uh,” he said. “W—what’s our best course of action? Like what’re we gonna do to stop these people? They sound like they need to be stopped.” 

“Well,” Phoebe mused. “I can try and contact some of my old friends. Knowing them, they’ll be reluctant, but they’ll most likely find it in themselves to at least stop by. However, one of you is gonna have to head out to this little town called Asheville to… collect Jean.” 

A discontented murmur ran through the group.

“It won’t be easy to do, no doubt,” Phoebe continued, a disgruntled look crossing her face. “Hell, knock him unconscious and drag him here if you have to. But he’s our best shot. So who wants to go get him?”

There was an awkward pause.

“I will,” Jesse blurted.

He immediately regretted it. He had no idea where the words had come from, and frankly no idea what he was walking into.

Shit.

Phoebe grinned. 

  
“Lit,” she said. “You’re gonna wanna bring some donut holes, and if possible, a few cassette tapes of bad 80s music. Also, a fair warning, you’re gonna really have to kick Jean in the ass to get him to leave Asheville. If he starts going on about how the world’s falling to pieces and nothing matters, go ahead and mention the name Hollyleaf. He’ll shut the fuck up _ real  _ quick.”


	6. A Confrontation

Jesse climbed out of the car Phoebe had loaned him.

The cabin itself didn’t look like much. Just a simple wooden dwelling down a half-mile long unpaved driveway near the tiny town of Asheville. It was the man changing a tire on a motorcycle on the front lawn that caught Jesse’s attention.

He was about his height, maybe a little taller, and  _ much  _ more muscular, Jesse realized. Even in the autumn chill, the guy only wore a black tank top and jeans. His skin, dark like Jesse’s, was a shade or so lighter and spattered with freckles and countless scars. His pale blue-grey eyes were narrowed against the late afternoon sun, and his black hair was damp with sweat as he effortlessly shoved the new tire onto the iron, screwed the bolts back in place, and tossed the old one casually over his shoulder with his metal arm.

Oh, right, he also had a metal arm.

It looked similar in construction to Petra’s, but the silvery black metal was obviously engineering even more complex and skilled, and from what Jesse could see, the seams were lined in gold. 

Then he spotted him.

The guy’s eyes flashed with alarm, and he snatched up a rifle that was leaning against his toolbox.

“I’m gonna ask you two questions,” the man snarled. “And you better listen up because I’m not repeating myself. Who the hell are you, and how did you get this address?”

Jesse clenched his jaw, fighting the urge to turn around and sprint away. The man’s face contorted with fury, his pale eyes disturbingly bright. The right side of his face was covered in long-healed but still gruesome burn tissue, and there was a pale strip of scarring over his right eye: a knife wound that had obviously raked down from his forehead, slicing his eyebrow but narrowly missing his eye itself.

And, of course, you couldn’t forget the fact that the guy had a huge scar on his shoulder that looked like it was  _ still healing. _

“Answer me, or you’re gonna get a bullet in your head.”

Jesse heaved a sigh.

He didn’t like this already.

“Are you Jean Orion?” He asked, holding up his hands and trying to appear non-threatening, which was difficult in full battle armor with a sword on his back. “I need to speak to him.”

The man narrowed his eyes and lowered his rifle a bit.

“You’re talking to him.”

Jesse sighed in relief. “Good,” he said. “I’m Jesse Oswalt. There’s something going on, and Phoebe sent me. You’re needed back in Beacontown.”

Jean froze, a multitude of emotions flashing across his face. 

Finally, he scoffed in irritation, grabbed a hunting jacket off the tool bench and put it on. Then he climbed onto the motorcycle and started the engine.

“Do me a favor and piss off, will you? And tell Phoebe I don’t wanna be a part of her shit,” Jean snapped, and before Jesse could respond, he drove away, leaving a cloud of dust in his wake.

Jesse stared in confusion.

This was going to be harder than he thought.

———

Jesse pushed open the door to the pub.

Of everything he’d seen in this town, he figured that from Phoebe’s advice, this was the best place to find Jean.

He wasn’t liking this reality’s version of himself very much.

Still grumbling, he scanned the small pub from the doorway for any signs of Jean. Aside from a few shady-looking guys in the corner, and an old, scrawny woman with sandy hair who was regarding him suspiciously from a nearby table, it was nearly empty.

Then he saw him.

He was sitting at the bar, sipping from a glass of amber liquid, chatting with the bartender. The bartender, a woman with wavy blonde hair, pale skin, and odd purple tattoos under her eyes, glanced up from the glass she was cleaning.

Jesse awkwardly met her gaze.

The woman frowned, and whispered something to Jean. Jean didn’t move, but visibly stiffened as the woman headed back into the kitchen.

Jesse sighed and approached the bar, climbing onto the stool next to Jean, who was pointedly ignoring him.

“I thought I told you to piss off.”

Jesse bit back a sharp retort, taking in Jean’s grumpy look. The guy, although he was exactly the same age as him, seemed older somehow. His wavy black hair had been swept off his forehead and brushed aside, revealing the burn scars on his cheek and his pale eyes. The unnerving, fractured, icy look in them almost made him shrink back, even though Jean was still staring moodily at the counter.

“I’m not going away,” Jesse said, catching sight of Jean’s metal hand again, gleaming a dull silver in the dim lighting. “Phoebe sent me. She wants to talk to you.”

Jean seemed to consider it for a moment, but he just scoffed and went back to his drink.

“Good evening, sir,” the blonde bartender interjected cheerfully. Jesse noticed her distinct English accent. “Can I get you anything to drink?”

“Just a water, thanks,” Jesse said.

“Anyway,” he continued. “Phoebe sent me. She told me to go find you, because there’s something big going on that she wants to clue you in—”

Jean let out a harsh laugh.

“I don’t care,” he muttered, his voice slurring a bit. “Whatever bullshit it is this time, I don’t give a damn what happens. Now let me drink away my feelings in peace, will you?”

Jesse winced. 

Jean was  _ drunk. _

“Jean, this is gonna sound crazy,” he said tiredly. “But I’m you.”

Jean actually looked up this time, scowling darkly. 

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“I’m you, but I’m you from another reality,” Jesse explained. “I know it sounds like I’m off-the-shits crazy, but there’s this lady who’s gonna rip apart the fabric of space and time, and Phoebe said that you’re the best warrior in this reality who’s also a con. We need your help, man.”

Jean stared at him.

Jesse held his breath, hoping for a positive answer, but it was no use. Jean just rolled his eyes and took another sip of whatever concoction was in his cup.

There was an awkward beat of silence.

“What’re you drinking?” Jesse finally asked. It seemed to be a topic that was least likely to make Jean either a) clam up, b) make some snide remark, or of course, c) hit him over the head with his metal arm.

Jean shrugged. “A special mix of whiskey and tequila Romelle cooked up,” he said. “I heal faster than most. Takes a little more than a few shots to get me buzzed.”

“Oh, is Romelle the bartender?” Jesse asked. “She a friend of yours?”

“Yeah,” Jean said, his gaze softening a bit. “She dated my late best friend, Oona. I know her pretty well since she runs the only bar here that I haven’t been kicked out of for public drunkenness.”

He paused, taking a sip of his drink. 

“Joke’s on them,” he said, a bitter smile spreading across his face. “It’s only when I’m blackout drunk that I get a reprieve from the nightmares.”

“Nightmares?” Jesse asked.

Jean chuckled grimly, his metal fingers clenching around his glass. “The war didn’t happen in your timeline, did it?”

“I know about it,” Jesse said. “Petra—she’s Phoebe but from my reality—has transversed several times. She says the war happened in a lot of them. You know that it’s switched in one? Aidan was out for your blood, while Lukas, well, you knew him as Luis, was your closest friend?”

Jean grunted, taking another sip.

Jesse thought he saw pain flash through his gaze.

“So can you come help us?” He finally asked. “Please?”

“You don’t know what Mapleshade did to me, do you?” Jean growled. “She manipulated me, ever since I first crashed on Archidae, and managed to kill almost everyone I loved because I tried to cut my ties with her and her lackeys. Then later she mind-controlled me. I killed more than a hundred people,  _ that we know of, _ and I killed Luis, too, when he was apparently trying to redeem himself.”

Jesse winced.

“Every night, when I go to sleep, I can still hear them screaming,” Jean said, a painful and bitter look in his eyes. “The only thing that helps is this.”

He swirled his drink around in his glass. “Cheers.”

He took a deep swig.

Jesse pursed his lips as Jean leaned back on his stool, a lopsided, ill-disposed smirk growing on his scarred face. 

“Anyway,” Jean continued, his acidic, spiteful tone only rising. “I don’t give a fuck, I never intend on ever giving a fuck ever again, and the universe could fucking implode and I’d be fine with that because existence is a joke and absolutely nothing matters to me anymore. Now do me a huge favor and piss off, uh… the fuck was your name again?”

Jesse gritted his teeth in frustration. He was getting nowhere with this.

“Really?” He demanded, his anger boiling over.  _ “Nothing _ matters to you? So I could, theoretically, kill Phoebe and you’d be okay with it?”

He knew he’d struck a nerve when Jean’s head snapped up, the menacing glower on his face and the scars giving him an animal-like, almost deranged appearance.

“Don’t you  _ fucking _ talk about her like that,” he growled.

Jesse just glared back. He remembered what Phoebe had told him, back in Beacontown:

_ “You’re gonna really have to kick Jean in the ass to get him to leave Asheville. If he starts going on about how the world’s falling to pieces and nothing matters, go ahead and mention the name Hollyleaf. He’ll shut the fuck up  _ real _ quick.” _

“You wouldn’t lift a finger to help her?” He continued to taunt. “If, let’s say somebody I heard about named  _ Hollyleaf  _ had a knife to her throat, you’d let her die? You’ve turned your back on everyone you still love, and you wouldn’t give a damn if someone killed them?”

With a furious hiss, Jean grabbed his throat and slammed him face-first into the countertop.

Jesse gasped in pain at the impact, and wheezed in surprise as his air was suddenly cut off as Jean shoved his throat against the rail.

“You better shut your fucking mouth,” Jean spat, leaning so close to his ear that Jesse caught a whiff of his alcohol-soured breath. “Or I swear to fucking StarClan I’m gonna bash your pretty fucking face in.”

Jesse knew he had to keep taunting him if he was going to make any difference, so he let out a strangled laugh. “Maybe if you weren’t such a  _ coward, _ you’d do something, fuckhead,” he retorted, and shoved Jean back as hard as he could.

Jean toppled off his bar stool and onto the floor, but he was up in seconds, his pale blue eyes filled with unbridled rage. 

Before Jesse could react, Jean punched him in the face. 

_ Hard.  _

Jesse reeled, stumbling backwards and tripped over a chair.

Then Jean was on him again, pinning his arms with his knees and punching him over and over. 

Jesse managed a strangled scream of pain as he felt something break with a painful crunching sound, and waves of molten agony swelled across his face with every strike. 

_ “Don’t—call—me—a fucking—COWARD!”  _

Black spots danced across Jesse’s vision.

They cleared just enough that he could see Jean leaning over him with his fist raised and ready to smash into his jaw again, his battered face contorted grotesquely with fury and… terror?

“Then help us save the few people you have left,” Jesse croaked, his consciousness fading. “Or are you too  _ afraid  _ to do that?”

There was a snarl of rage from Jean, and then he blacked out.


	7. A Friend

He awoke to the sound of a record scratch. 

Jesse groaned. 

His face felt weird. 

He blinked, and then realized that it hurt to blink, which was  also weird. 

He wondered why. 

Oh, right, he’d blacked out after trying to mock some sense into Jean to the point of the guy beating the shit out of him. 

“Oh, you’re awake,” a woman’s voice with a pleasant English lilt said. 

Jesse glanced around. Even with his left eye swollen shut and his right eye only able to open halfway, he recognized the blonde woman pulling another record sleeve out of a nearby drawer as the bartender, Romelle. Also, they were in Jean’s cabin, apparently, judging by the dozens of papers tacked to one wall, and a mural painted on the other in muted greys and blacks. 

The absence of color was distressing. 

“Whitney Houston or Dolly Parton?” Romelle asked, holding up two records. 

“Whitney Houston,” Jesse mumbled, wincing. 

His nose hurt, a lot. He hoped it hadn’t gotten too badly broken. 

“Hey, Romelle,” he finally asked, “Where’s Jean?”

Romelle made a face. 

Now that he could see her up close, he was able to get a good look at her. She was short and slender with pale skin and graceful hands, and wore a knee-length pink sundress and a white blouse and heels, but the scars criss-crossing her biceps and her callused fingers made it clear that she was anything but delicate. Her eyes, which were a deep, inky purple, almost seemed to glow, and her golden-blonde hair was pulled back in an intricate set of braids. There were also strange purple markings under her eyes, and Jesse couldn’t tell whether they were tattoos or face paint. 

“Jean’s asleep in his room,” Romelle explained. “I had to knock him out cold to keep him from breaking your neck, Jesse. It was not a wise idea for you to torment him. Now, explain everything.”

Jesse gave her the brief version. 

She just stared at him in confusion for a few seconds.

Then she scoffed and walked away and into the kitchen, as if this wasn’t a particularly big deal for her.

Jesse glanced around, taking in the condition of Jean’s house. He seemed to be in the living room, and he was lying on a futon next to an overstuffed armchair. In front of him, there was a television that looked like it belonged in the 1970s, and there was a record player sitting on the end table next to it playing  I Wanna Dance With Somebody. A filing cabinet labeled  Records (Music and Important) stood off in the corner. On almost every exposed table, there were empty liquor bottles and dozens of snack wrappers and instant macaroni packages.

The entire place had a depressing aura.

Then, off to the left, there was that one wall covered in papers, photos, lists, and maps that were all strung together so that it resembled an elaborate flow chart constructed by a spider on LSD.

Jesse decided not to ask about it.

“Honestly, I’m not surprised,” Romelle said as she walked back in, carrying a plate of bacon and eggs on a tray and a glass of orange juice. “With the amount of terrible things us people always seemed to get involved in, this isn’t the  weirdest thing. You should’ve seen Phoebe’s face when Jean came back after he disappeared for a month and we presumed him dead.”

“What do you mean?” Jesse asked. “Why’d you presume him dead? I’ve gone missing for longer, and people didn’t lose hope.”

Romelle laughed. “We thought Jean died in a fiery explosion, silly. Now take the medicine I left you.”

Jesse winced, suddenly able to connect the mass of burn tissue on Jean’s cheek to something. And a fiery explosion didn’t exactly sound like a pleasant thing to survive.

He sighed and took the pill on his plate. 

To his surprise, the swelling in his face went down in a matter of seconds, and the throbbing in his nose dulled to a faint ache. Whatever medicine was in that thing, he needed to get some to Olivia so she could synthesize some. It could probably save lives back home. 

Then, as if mentioning his name had summoned him, Jean limped out of the kitchen wearing nothing but a pair of sweatpants, holding a carton of orange juice to a bruising weal on his jaw. 

He looked a lot more lucid than before, or in other words, angrier.

Jean caught sight of Jesse laying on the couch. His eyebrows arched briefly, but it quickly turned into a sullen look as Jean glared at him coldly, gingerly sitting down in the armchair.

“Hey,” Jesse said awkwardly.

Jean just narrowed his eyes and took a sip of orange juice.

Romelle stood and grabbed Jean’s arm; the metal one, and started dragging him off into the kitchen. 

“Where are you—” Jesse blurted.

“Jean and I need to have a talk,” Romelle cut him off, her voice edged with granite.


	8. Afterimage

“Okay, first of all, what the hell?”

Jean gritted his teeth. He was used to getting yelled at by Romelle.

“You heard him,” he muttered. “He mentioned  _ her. _ I don’t like it when people bring her up.”

“You had no reason to beat him up like that!”

Jean winced.

He hated this. He hated this so, so much. After Mapleshade had finally been done away with, he’d lost Aidan, the last person he really loved. He’d sworn off adventuring, and he’d ran here to Asheville to hide and preferably to die in peace. He’d cut himself off from his old friendships so he wouldn’t have to risk watching them get killed in front of him, like everyone else he’d cared about.

Now that Jesse, who was supposedly him from another reality, who’d mocked him for being bitter and reclusive, was  _ in is own goddamn house, _ Jean felt angry.

The nightmares were bad enough.

_ Your fault. _

_ Your punishment. _

The afterimage of Luis’s eyes, open and dead, his face frozen in a look of dismal and melancholy happiness, was burned into his mind like the scars on his face.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Jean snapped. “I’m not leaving. I came here to die. I’m not helping them, end of story.”

Romelle scowled at him. “He had a point. You have people left, you’ve just cut yourself off from them because you’re afraid to lose them. You can’t just sit here and waste away while the entire universe is in danger. Now  _ I’m  _ going to talk to Jesse, and  _ you’re _ going to go take a bath, because you smell like body odor and vodka.”

She turned on her heel and left.

Muttering irritably to himself, Jean headed for the bathroom.

Personally, he actually enjoyed taking baths, even if it meant having to look at his scars. The warm water was calming and soothing, and if he fell asleep there, the nightmares usually stayed away.

He’d come to the conclusion that water easing his suffering was his Aidan’s final blessing.

With a sigh, Jean shut the door and turned the faucet on. While the tub was filling, he stripped off his clothes and checked over his right arm, which had long ago been lost and replaced by a vibranium prosthetic designed by his late best friend. 

Everything seemed to be in working condition today.

Then he glanced over at himself in the mirror, performing his daily ritual of tallying up his scars and reminding himself why they were there, and where they’d come from.

He chuckled miserably, staring at the burns that covered the right side of his body, the slashes on his ribs, the ragged patch of scar tissue on his thigh, the knife scar that ran across his left eye, the two missing toes on his right foot, and, of course, the scars disappearing under metal where his prosthetic connected with his flesh. 

Reminders, that was what they were.

He climbed into the tub, sighing in relief as the warm water soothed his flesh arm, bruised from when Jesse had shoved him into the table. 

He yawned. 

Even though he’d already gotten at least eight hours of sleep, thanks to Romelle knocking him unconscious, he felt drowsy.

Before he realized what was happening, he’d dozed off.

———

_ “Jean!” _

_ Jean sat up, frantically scrambling for a weapon. _

_ Then he realized he was dreaming, for one thing, and this one didn’t seem violent. He was sitting in a cozy-looking lounge, lying on a sofa, wrapped in a soft blanket. _

_ He scowled. He hadn’t lucid-dreamt like this since before the war, since you couldn’t really call visiting the Place of No Stars lucid dreaming. During said visits, your consciousness was literally being transported to another plane of existence, so it was more like astral projection than dreaming.  _

_ But then he saw the man sitting in an armchair across from him. _

_ He stopped cold. _

_ Aidan looked exactly like he always had. Well, ever since the whole Oriande Incident, when he’d not only discovered his bizarre alien heritage, but also learned how to use magic, which had sent streaks of white-blond through his dark black hair. His green facial markings were glowing, like they did when he was angry, excited, or using his magic. _

_ “You’re being stupid.” _

_ “Aidan!” Jean gasped, his breath seizing up. _

_ “Shut the hell up and listen to me, dumbass,” Aidan hissed, scowling angrily. “You’re doing it again! You know, the thing? Where you try to run away from your problems instead of facing them like you used to?” _

_ Jean flinched. That comment stung, mostly because it was true, and he didn’t like it when people pointed it out. _

_ “Aidan, what… what are you doing?” He managed to say. “What are you doing here?”  _

_ Aidan sighed, massaging his forehead and grimacing.  _

_ “I’m technically everywhere,” he said. “And somehow nowhere, at the same time. It’s strenuous, but I can solidify my consciousness to project into dreams, and I needed to talk some sense into you. Jesse’s here for a very good reason, Jean. There’s something happening that I can’t stop; that Lukas and Jasper can’t stop, even though we literally hold the fabric of space and time together. They need you.” _

_ Jean just stared at him for a moment.  _

_ He felt like his brain had blown a fuse. All of his bitterness and anger was colliding with his guilt and anguish, and he couldn’t control it.  _

_ He wanted to help.  _

_ He wanted to.  _

_ But he didn’t know how much more pain he could take.  _

_ He’d come dangerously close to snapping before. The residual traces of dark energy caught in his brain kept him on edge, making it hard for him to reason effectively. He was constantly having to fight what was left of Mapleshade’s rage and vengeance for control, having to fight back against the voice of Shadowfire—the name of the personality Mapleshade’s magic had created—and to this day he was still occasionally hit by headaches as he was forced to suppress all the bloodlust and fury from the ghost of a twisted, evil being; that kept boiling inside him without relenting.  _

_ He didn’t know if he could help Jesse.  _

_ Suddenly, his surroundings seemed to shudder and desolidify for a split second. _

_ Aidan’s eyes flashed with fear.  _

_ “Shit,” he muttered. “You need to get out of here. She’s coming.” _

_ Jean opened his mouth to either ask who “she” was or protest (he hadn’t decided yet), but Aidan pressed a hand over his mouth, stopping his words. _

_ “Wake up,” he said. “I’m counting on you, Jean.  _ We’re  _ counting on you.” _


	9. To Make A Choice

Jean gasped and jolted awake, accidentally inhaling a mouthful of bath water. 

“Shit!” He coughed. 

He sat up, wiping water out of his eyes, and began to actually bathe himself, cursing under his breath. 

He felt bitter. 

Conflicted. 

The last person he’d let himself love, who had literally become time and space itself, had come to him in a dream, and for what? To yell at him for being selfish?

He climbed out of the tub and grabbed a towel. 

Tears were stinging in his eyes. 

Aidan was right. 

He couldn’t afford to let the few friends he still had left die because he’d turned into a sad, lonely, alcoholic fuck-up who’d turned his back on the world. 

He wrapped the towel around his waist and headed to his room. 

There, he dressed for combat: His hunting jacket, steel-toed combat boots, cargo pants, a thin and breathable black tank top, his tool belt, his knife in its sheath, his rifle over his shoulder. 

Then, he opened his closet and picked up the box on the floor in the corner. It hadn’t moved since he’d shoved it back here two and a half years ago, hoping to forget the pain and grief the objects inside brought him whenever he had to look at them.

He took a deep breath and opened it. 

Inside, a simple diamond sword three quarters the length of his arm glinted in the ceiling light, its deadly glacial blue blade razor sharp and rippling with magic, resting next to its sheath. 

Next to it were two smaller items: a simple metal pin shaped like the Order of The Stone’s emblem, and a necklace with two pendants: A ThunderClan crest, and a shimmering red metal lion head. 

His heart pounding, Jean slowly picked up the necklace and slipped the thin leather cord over his head. Then he attached the pin to his jacket, and lifted the sword, slid it into the sheath, and slung it over his shoulder. 

He reached over his shoulder and drew the blade quickly, testing the weight in his hand and slashing the air. 

Then the door to his bedroom opened, and he saw Romelle, grinning. 

He scowled. 

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I just knew you’d change your mind.”

Jean huffed. “I’m not doing this because I think there’s good left saving,” he grumbled. “I’m doing it because I’m not a coward. Now grab your suit and let’s get going, Romi. We’re losing daylight.”


	10. New Friends

They left at noon.

Jesse had to admit, he was in a good mood. He’d managed to persuade Jean to come with him—no small feat, judging by the attitude Phoebe had had—and they were on their way back to Beacontown.

Mission accomplished.

They currently two hours into the drive, sitting in the car Phoebe had loaned him: An old, beat-up station wagon with a tape deck. 

Jesse had a suspicion that she’d made him take this one for that sole reason, because keeping Jean in a good mood seemed to involve alcohol, copious amounts of snacks, some 80s tunes, and no talking whatsoever.

Things had gotten awkward  _ real _ fast.

He glanced back at the man, who was lounging in the backseat, eating donut holes while occasionally sipping from his hip flask. Jean wasn’t really paying attention to anything. He was pretty much just staring out the window, tracing his fingers over the stitching on his sword sheath. 

Oh yeah, he also had a surprisingly large arsenal of weapons on his person: A hunting knife in his belt, small pistol on his opposite hip, a rifle that was resting on the seat next to him, his fancy sword, and a switchblade concealed inside his jacket, next to his ammo belt.

Jesse had a feeling that Jean had a few more knives hidden elsewhere.

And there was the fact that Jean seemed to have an almost magical sense of how to find snacks. 

By the time they reached Beacontown, Jean had worked his way through the whole bag of donut holes, a bag of Cheetos, a bag of chips,  _ and _ a Tupperware container full of cookie dough that Jesse had been saving. 

He was still bitter about that. 

Romelle parked right next to the Order Hall. Jesse unbuckled his seatbelt, but Jean just slid lower in his seat, scowling. 

“Alright, Jean, get your arse out of the car,” Romelle said. “I hope you two have fun. I’m going to stop by my lab.”

Jean’s scowl deepened. 

Jesse pursed his lips. He recognized this. Soren had reacted the same way when he’d been reunited with his friends.

“C’mon,” he said. “You’re gonna have to see them again anyway.”

Jean made an irritable growling noise, but obliged. “You owe me for this, Oswalt,” he muttered. 

Then they headed inside. 

As soon as they entered the conference room, Jesse noticed two things.

One, Petra had a new bruise on her face. 

Two, Hawkfrost was lying on the floor, clutching a bright blue stuffed mouse and giggling hysterically. It didn’t exactly make sense until Jesse spotted the empty bag of catnip lying next to him. 

Before Jesse could ask about it, Phoebe jumped up out of her seat, stormed up to Jean, and slapped him across the face. 

Jean yelped and staggered backwards. 

“You asshole!” Phoebe yelled.  _ “That _ was for completely disappearing on me!” 

She slapped him a second time. 

_ “That  _ was for making me really fucking worried about you!”

She slapped him a third time. 

“And  _ that’s _ for wearing a goddamn tank top in fifty-degree weather, you fucking dumbass!” 

Then she threw her arms around Jean and hugged him. 

“Don’t you ever fucking do that to me again,” she hissed. “You little shit.”

Jean’s expression soured. 

Jesse managed not to laugh. 

“I don’t want to be here,” Jean grumbled, taking another gulp of whatever was in his hip flask. “I’m only here so that Aid—Romelle will stay off my ass. So who do I have to kill this time?”

Phoebe narrowed her eyes. “You do realize that if you keep drinking like that it’s gonna kill  _ you _ instead, right?”

“That’s the point.”

Phoebe rolled her eyes. 

“Anyway,” Jesse said, glancing pointedly at Petra. “I think we should get going. “You said we only have days, right? Jean already knows what’s happening. I explained it to him, even though he’s being uncooperative.” 

“Yeah, blah blah blah, evil lady, crazy evil Luis, space and time goes boom if we don’t stop them,” Jean grumbled dryly. “Just point me in the direction of whoever I have to stab.”

“Great!” Petra said excitedly. “There’s gonna be plenty of stabbing for you to do. Like Jesse said, we have a week, maybe two, to stop the fabric of space and time from being torn apart, so let’s hit the road, everybody!”


	11. Crossroads

Not only was the space between timelines nauseatingly lacking in the basic laws of physics, but it also brought back memories. 

Jean clenched his teeth. 

He remembered the fight here. How Mapleshade had  _ almost _ succeeded. 

“You okay?” Jesse asked. 

Jean winced. He gingerly took a step forward, inching along after Jesse. 

“I don’t like this place,” he muttered. 

“Me neither,” Jesse remarked. “It’s a little too trippy, especially how there’s no actual ground, and we’re walking on an infinite abyss of nothing. Wait, Petra, slow down.”

Jean squinted at the tall woman. 

He wasn’t fond of this version of Phoebe, especially the snappy attitude. 

It reminded him a little too much of what he used to be before the war, back when he was naïve and hungry for adventure. 

He felt twitchy, too. His intuition had been sharpened by years of combat and conquest, and right now there was tension in the air. Somehow, he could sense it. 

There was a fight coming. 

Then, sure enough, it happened. 

In a blur of light, a figure of indeterminate gender suddenly leapt out of the nearest river of light in an explosion of color. They had a sword that gleamed deadly sharp. 

In the split second time it took Jean to draw his sword, whoever it was attacked Petra. 

Petra snarled in rage and attempted to backhand them. 

Two more figures appeared, lunging at Lukas and Jesse. 

Jean felt something inside him flare up. 

He couldn’t let these people die. 

“Leave them alone!” He shouted, lashing out at the nearest of the three. 

From what little of their face Jean could see around the dark red bandanna, he guessed it was a man, with military-buzzed black hair and brown skin, his eyes a strange golden color. 

He hissed angrily, and suddenly Jean recognized him. 

“Breezewing?”

Fake Breezewing snarled and slammed him back with the butt of his spear. 

“What the hell?” Jean snapped, clutching his stinging ribs in one hand and parrying strikes with the other. “You  _ died _ in the Siege of Beacontown!”

Fake Breezewing didn’t seem daunted by the idea of death. In fact, he just growled “I don’t know who you are!”

That stung. 

Jean quickly blocked another swing, and managed to scrape Fake Breezewing’s shoulder. 

He screamed and lashed out. 

Jean wasn’t fast enough this time. 

The butt of the spear slammed into his ribs again, sending him careening sideways, and then he was enveloped in white. 

———

He plowed face-first into a snowdrift. 

Head throbbing, Jean forced himself upright. The air had a sharp metallic smell, like burning metal. 

The snow didn’t taste great, either.

Then Jean saw the sky. 

It was overcast, but the clouds looked abnormally dark. Where patches of blue sky should’ve been visible, it was a murky brownish yellow, like smog. Strangely colored lightning occasionally flickered, but there was no thunder.

The forest he’d landed in looked lifeless, and not just winter-lifeless. The bark on the trees was crumbly and dry, and Jean watched as a branch snapped in the cold wind like a dry twig. 

This was weird. 

Jean slowly got to his feet, assessing his condition. His ribs still ached, and his head was pounding, but aside from that he wasn’t hurt that bad. 

“Okay,” he growled. “Start moving. Find shelter. Those clouds look bad.”

He started to limp through the snow.

———

The first few hours of walking weren’t too bad. 

The chill of the air wasn’t that bad. Jean was glad he’d brought his hunting jacket, though. He was already cold and damp from plowing into that snowbank. 

However, things started to go downhill after maybe four or five hours of picking his way through the dead forest. 

Jean stumbled, crashed into a dead tree, and vomited. 

He groaned, wiping his mouth. 

He felt woozy and sick. 

His headache had gotten considerably worse, and he had a bad feeling that it wasn’t from his crash-landing. 

All the same, he kept stumbling along, even though he felt unusually fatigued, and suddenly uncomfortably warm in his hunting jacket. 

He took it off and tied it around his waist, shivering in the cold. 

Maybe it would get better as he walked. 

It didn’t. 

Head spinning, Jean staggered and collapsed in a small copse of dead trees near a small rock formation that he was _ sure _ he’d passed already. 

He retched again, even though there wasn’t anything left in his stomach. 

His head. 

Hurt. 

So.

Bad. 

His vision blurred. 

Then he heard the voice.

_ You’ve gone soft after all that time resting, you bastard. You couldn’t save them. I’m getting stronger, and one of these days, Jean— _

He panicked. 

He was back. 

He’d take over again. 

He’d kill him. 

Jean frantically hauled himself into a painful crouch, fumbling with his sword, which was difficult considering he was so weak he could barely lift it.

“Back off!” He shouted hoarsely at nothing in particular. His stomach heaved, and he doubled over, choking up bile. He felt blisteringly hot, but freezing cold, everything was spinning—

The last thing he saw was a hauntingly familiar face hovering above him. 

Then he blacked out. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ooOOoOOooh homeboy’s in trouble let’s see where this goes


	12. West

Jesse had just enough time to yell Jean’s name before the man vanished in a flash of light, a very startled look on his face. 

Then the man who’d attacked him lashed out again, his blade catching his forearm and tearing the fabric between the plates of his armor. 

Jesse cried out in pain. 

Off to the right, he heard shouting and a nasty  _ thump  _ sound.

Then the man turned and broke into a sprint. A scream echoed around them as the first figure yanked a sack over Petra’s head. 

Jesse gritted his teeth and broke into a run, but it was too late. 

Petra’s angry cursing was cut off as the three figures dragged her into one of the streams of light and vanished. 

Jesse glanced around wildly. 

Lukas was lying in a heap on the ground, a wound on his forehead bleeding. He appeared to be unconscious. 

Phoebe, on the other hand, looked completely fine. 

“Where the  _ hell _ did they go?” She yelled, spinning in hasty circles. “I swear to fucking god, I’m gonna kick—oh, Jesse.”

Jesse knelt by Lukas, carefully studying the wound. It didn’t  _ look  _ terrible, but Jesse couldn’t remember what the problem with head wounds was: Did they look  _ worse  _ than they actually were, or was it the other way around?

It was ironic, especially because Lukas was the healer. 

“Why?” Jesse muttered. “Are you kidding me? You, of all people, had to pass out.”

Lukas let out a weak moan. 

Jesse bit back a curse. 

“Hey, Phoebe,” he said. “Help me carry him. I think I know how to get somewhere safer.”

Phoebe sighed, but relented. 

Together, they managed to lift Lukas and drag him to a light stream not too far off. This one seemed to be glowing brighter than many of the others. 

Jesse suddenly remembered something Petra had mentioned offhand yesterday. 

“It’s a central thread,” he murmured. 

Phoebe raised an eyebrow. 

“That’s what Petra called a timeline without many branches,” Jesse mused, gazing at the stream. “She mentioned them being unstable and dangerous.”

“Awesome,” Phoebe said. 

Jesse cringed. “I think your word association is broken.”

Phoebe just laughed. 

Jesse let out a heavy sigh. He was  _ definitely  _ seeing the similarities between Petra and Phoebe now. 

They stepped into the stream of light, carrying Lukas between them. 

———

They emerged into what appeared to be the food court of a shopping mall. 

Surprisingly, they didn’t get many odd glances, except from a few middle school-age kids in black collared shirts and khakis who noticed them and started talking in hushed whispers. 

“Well,” Jesse said. “Looks okay.”

He yelped, suddenly taking Lukas’s full weight as Phoebe made a beeline for a fast food restaurant sign. 

Grumbling in irritation, he carefully set Lukas down in one of the plastic chairs, at a table as far away from that group of schoolchildren as he could. The area seemed safe enough, so he squeezed the hidden button on his collar. His armor retracted soundlessly into a small pin attached to his left suspender that was shaped like the Order of the Stone’s crest. 

Olivia had integrated Ivor’s armor designs with her nanotech, which was invaluable on trips like these. 

Jesse glanced at Lukas’s head wound. 

It still didn’t look too severe on its own, but the bloody, bruising welt that was forming and Lukas’s sickly-pale face said otherwise. 

Jesse cursed under his breath. 

Of course the healer on the team had to be the one to get knocked unconscious.

He wondered if Jean knew anything about medicine. Then he remembered that he’d been knocked into another reality, and that Petra had been kidnapped by evil people with swords. 

Suddenly, Lukas let out a weak groan, and slowly opened his eyes. 

“Oh, thank  _ fuck!”  _ Jesse exclaimed. 

Lukas grimaced, shielding his eyes against the ceiling lights, which wasn’t that bright, to be honest. 

“Ow,” he muttered. “Bright. Hurts my eyes. Wait, where am I?”

“We’re in a mall food court,” Jesse explained, patting his arm. “Phoebe’s getting food. Don’t worry, we weren’t followed by any of those guys.”

Lukas just stared at him blankly. 

Jesse paused. “Lukas, you okay?” He asked. Then he noticed something weird. Despite the mall being as bright as day, Lukas’s left pupil had dilated considerably. 

Lukas suddenly wobbled in his seat, but caught himself. His hands were shaking. 

“Uhm, I really don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t know what’s going on,” Lukas mumbled. “First off, who’s Phoebe? Also… what do you mean, we weren’t followed? Do you know? What happened? My head hurts, and I can’t remember why…”

Lukas grimaced and poked the bloody welt on his temple. 

Everything clicked into place. 

Jesse suddenly felt a cold, cold feeling in his stomach.

“Lukas,” he asked, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “What  _ do _ you remember?”

Lukas hesitated, his brow furrowing. 

“My… my name,” he mumbled. “You called me Lukas. I… I think I… I don’t know.”

Jesse felt a sickening jolt. 

He’d seen amnesia before. Back during the Wither Storm incident, Gabriel, one of Ivor’s former friends, had gotten it. They’d tried to jog his memory, but what ultimately had cured it was killing the damn monster. 

Lukas’s hadn’t been caused by the poison from the creature. He’d been hit in the head by a war hammer. 

“Who are you?” Lukas blurted, his voice edged with hysteria. “What’s wrong?”


	13. A Cold Welcome

The passage of time was hazy. 

Occasionally, the fog would lift slightly; a spoon pushing past his lips, a blanket draped over him, a sharp pain in his forearm, soft voices. 

Other than that, Jean lived somewhere between conscious and unconscious for… days? Weeks?

He couldn’t tell for sure. 

Finally the fog lifted. 

He was lying on a cot in a clean white room, wrapped in blankets. He felt strangely cold, like he was sitting in a crevasse back on the Frost Ridge glacier on Archidae. 

Then the door opened. 

Jean gasped. 

“Maya?” He murmured hoarsely. 

The woman frowned. “I don’t know a Maya,” she said. “I’m May. I have food for you.”

Jean eagerly took the plate and cutlery. He didn’t care that the unattractive brown mush in his bowl tasted like cardboard, or that the water had that same, odd metallic flavor. 

He was  _ starving. _

May watched him the entire time. She didn’t look angry. More… curious. 

“What’s your name?” 

Jean hesitated. He’d always had a hard time trusting people, but then again, he had a gut feeling this woman had saved his life. 

Also, he really wanted to know where he was and what had made him pass out. 

“I’m Jean,” he said. “Where am I?”

May sighed. 

“Well, we found you in the woods outside Ground Town,” she said. “How did you end up here? Did you get separated from your caravan? And you had radiation poisoning, but no wounds except for a bruise on your head. What happened to you? Did you run into an enderman haunting out there?”

Jean clenched his jaw. 

_ Caravan? Haunting? _

He recognized the word  _ enderman,  _ given that he’d dealt with them plenty back in his reality, but the context she used it in was unfamiliar. 

“Well, it’s a long story,” he huffed. He felt naked and vulnerable without a weapon.

May raised her eyebrows. 

Jean scowled. 

“I’m not from around here,” he said, and gave May the abbreviated version of how he’d ended up here. 

When he finished, it was deathly silent except for the sound of monitors. 

Jean shifted uncomfortably. 

May pressed her lips together, her eyes narrowing as she stared at him, and Jean caught sight of the gun holstered on her hip. 

“He  _ does _ look like Jacob,” she mused.

Then, with no further elaboration, she stood from her chair and left. 

Jean glanced at the IV in his left arm, scowling. He needed answers, and May seemed reluctant to give him them.

He yanked the IV out and got to his feet, pleasantly surprised by the lack of nausea, but he still felt more tired than he should’ve been. 

He had to figure out what was going on. 

He carefully pushed the door open, and was about to leave when he saw the rack of unfilled syringes in a cabinet. He grabbed one, studying the needle. 

Sure, it wasn’t the best weapon, but it was better than nothing. 

He began making his way down the hall. 

The building looked old, and surprisingly ill-maintained for a hospital. There were patches of mold near the windows, the floorboards were grimy, and the wall paint was peeling. He guessed the walls were plaster and concrete. The latter of which would be a challenge to punch through if he had to escape, especially in his weakened state. 

He grimaced. 

Finally he made it to a corner. It sounded like it turned off into a waiting area, judging by the amount of voices.

Jean’s heart skipped a beat when he heard May say his name. 

“He seemed distrustful,” May said. 

“I mean, why wouldn’t he?” 

Jean managed to stifle his gasp. That was  _ Aidan’s  _ voice. 

“Picture it,” he continued, an edge to his voice. “You wake up in an unfamiliar place, unarmed, wearing nothing but a hospital gown and feeling too weak to fight. How do you think he was gonna respond? Tell us, people he’s never met and  _ definitely  _ doesn’t know the intentions of, his entire fucking life story right off the bat?”

“You said he looked like me,” another voice said. “Maybe he’ll be more willing to talk to me because I look like him. After all, he’s been unconscious for almost three weeks.”

Jean frowned. That voice sounded like his own, only slightly higher-pitched and a bit more mellifluous. Maybe that was this reality’s version of himself. 

And he’d been unconscious for  _ almost three weeks? _

That wasn’t good news. 

“I’m with Andrew on this one. I’d clam up pretty quick if I were him. Honestly, I’m surprised he talked at all.”

That one was definitely Luis’s voice. 

Jean tensed. 

“Wait a minute,” Aidan’s voice said, his tone sharpening. 

Then, without warning, someone grabbed him and dragged him around the corner. 

He yelped frantically. Then he remembered his metal arm, whirled around, and punched and kicked and struggled, but he was just too tired. 

He finally just went limp with frustration. 

His head was hurting again. 

Then he caught sight of the people in the room, and almost screamed. 

May was standing next to a guy who looked a lot like Jesse, except this man looked a little younger and had lighter hair, a rounder face, and hazel eyes instead of green. 

Next to  _ him _ was a much taller man with military-style buzzed black hair and stubble covering his chin, and a slim blond man. 

All of them looked alarmed. 

Then he noticed the two people holding his arms. 

One was definitely this reality’s Phoebe, except she resembled Petra a lot more; taller, broader shoulders, short red hair. But she also had tons of freckles, and a scar on her chin. 

The other person… 

Jean tensed, his brain frantically trying to work everything out. 

This man was almost a carbon-copy of his Aidan, except that his hair was a dark brown instead of black, his nose was sharper, his face more defined, and a large scar cut through the left side of his face instead of Altean markings.

Oh, and his left hand was made of metal. That too.

His gaze was cold and calculating. 

He must’ve detected Jean’s change in mood, because his scowl deepened and his grip on his arm tightened. 

“Holy shit, he really does look like you, Jacob,” Luis’s lookalike murmured. 

“Don’t touch me,” Jean snarled, trying yet again to wrench himself free. 

This felt wrong. 

A little too weird. 

Just having his dead lover’s doppelgänger touching him felt bizarre and off-kilter. 

“Explain,” Aidan’s lookalike demanded. “I might let go  _ then, _ asshole.”

Jean scowled. 

“You’re not gonna believe this,” he began, “But whichever one of you is Jacob, I’m you. From another reality.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If any of you have read Crawl Out Through The Fallout, you’ll definitely recognize these characters, because (surprise surprise) their universe gets involved too! The only reason some names have been changed is to make things a little less confusing. Enjoy!


	14. Lost

Jesse felt bad for him. 

Lukas was hunched in his chair, picking miserably at his french fries. They’d put a bandage on his forehead wound, but he still looked tired, and his hands shook every time he picked up something to eat. He even periodically wobbled in his chair, as if the legs were uneven, even though they were fine. 

Jesse pulled out his phone. To his surprise, the internet connection worked. 

He decided to look up concussion-related amnesia. 

He knew generally that concussions could cause dizziness and nausea and cause memory loss, but he hadn’t known that they could affect fine motor control and movement (hence the shaking hands and faulty balance).

That made him nervous. All three of Lukas’s talents, piano, archery and medical, required  _ steady _ hands and  _ good _ balance. 

Lukas seemed to have, at least temporarily, lost both. 

And if the damage was permanent… 

Lukas picked up his burger, brow furrowed in concentration. His hands shook as he lifted it to his mouth, but then he wobbled again, and dropped it back onto the plate. 

Lukas opened his mouth as if to say something, but then shut it and grimaced, tears welling up in his eyes. 

He made a noise that sounded like a sob and buried his face in his hands. 

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”

“Woah, hey, what’s wrong?” Jesse asked.

“I’m missing something,” he mumbled weakly. “I feel like something’s missing, something went wrong, but I can’t remember what, and my head hurts…” 

Jesse winced. 

He wanted to somehow take the pain away, but he couldn’t. 

“How about this?” Phoebe said. “You ask things about yourself, and we’ll try to answer as best we can. Maybe that’ll jog your memory.”

Lukas hesitated, but he nodded slowly. 

“Can you tell me about you guys?”

Jesse heaved a sigh. “I’m Jesse,” he said. “I’m… I’m your friend. We saved the world together. Twice, actually.”

He realized, with a jolt, that Lukas was going to have to go through all the pain, all the terror of their travels all over again. 

And Lukas didn’t remember him. 

As far as he knew, any hope that maybe Lukas had had feelings for him were gone, completely wiped away with Lukas’s memories. 

He felt sad. 

Bitter. 

And Petra was missing, and if anyone could’ve brought him back, it would’ve been her. 

Phoebe was just too different. 

Lukas continued to ask questions, mostly on where they were, what was happening, and what they had to do. When they got to the part about Petra getting kidnapped, Lukas froze. 

“Petra,” he said. “I remember… something. It’s blurry, but… red hair. She was loud and got in trouble a lot. She looked a lot like Phoebe. A good friend, but… sad.”

Jesse smiled, even though he felt a pang of loneliness. 

“Yeah,” he said. “You two were really close. Childhood friends, I think. You two are also… well, as far as I know, you two would consider me a friend, too.”

The corners of Lukas’s mouth tugged into a faint grin. “Can’t wait to meet her.”

Jesse took a bite of his burger, not meeting Lukas’s eyes. Talking about Lukas’s relationship with Petra always made him feel awkward. The two had always been close, and from the way they acted, they seemed like they were more than friends. 

Now, the jealous part of him kept screaming to take advantage of this.

He quickly squashed that idea. Telling Lukas that he was in love with him while the poor guy could barely remember his own name would be  _ incredibly _ cruel. 

The schoolchildren in the black shirts were filing towards the escalator. One, however, a girl with greasy blonde hair and a pimpled face, maybe fourteen years old, stopped and stared at them. 

Jesse made awkward eye contact with the girl for a few seconds. 

Then she started to approach. 

Jesse swore under his breath. “Phoebe,” he hissed. “We’ve got company.”

“Are you lost?” The girl asked. 

Jesse noticed the little embroidery on her school shirt: A panther’s head outlined in silver, surrounded by a circle with the words  _ Rilke Schule  _ on the edges.

Before he could stop her, Phoebe responded. “Not really. Want a fry?”

The girl shrank back, nervousness flitting across her face. Then she saw the bandage on Lukas’s temple, and frowned, squinting at the dried blood. 

“Who  _ are _ you guys?”

Jesse hesitated, trying to come up with a feasible response. 

The girl apparently took their silence as an insult, because she scoffed and headed off towards the escalator after her school group. 

“I’m gonna write about you guys,” she called over her shoulder. 

Jesse stared after her. 

Now  _ that _ exchange had been odd. 

“Well,” Phoebe said. “I think we should go and try to find some place to spend the night. It’s getting late.”

———

Jesse gazed wistfully at Lukas’s sleeping form. 

They’d managed to get a room in one of the hotels in the city they were in, which was called Anchorage. Unfortunately, they only had enough money for a room with a single bed, which meant Jesse was stuck in between Lukas and Phoebe, which was awkward enough, even if you didn’t count Jesse’s feelings toward Lukas. 

Speaking of Phoebe, Phoebe snored. 

Jesse grumbled in irritation. If he scooted any further away from her, he’d be up against Lukas’s back. 

He felt awful about all this. 

Petra was missing. 

Lukas had lost his memory. 

Hell knew where Jean had ended up. 

As he finally nodded off to sleep, he thought to himself:

_ Please let this all work out.  _

_ Please. _


	15. Dinner With Survivors

Jean pulled on the clothes the new people had given him. 

The blond man, who’d introduced himself as Lee, had drawn Andrew, the guy who resembled Aidan, off to the side as soon as Jean had explained where he’d come from. 

Judging by Lee’s frustrated expression, they were probably arguing. 

The man with the facial hair had introduced himself as Gill. He had seemed nice enough, but Jean wasn’t liking how cheerful he was, especially after they’d explained to him that the reality he’d ended up in was three hundred years after a nuclear war that had turned the entire planet into a radiation-filled wasteland. 

The tall Phoebe lookalike, Paige, had been watching him closely through narrowed eyes. Jean didn’t blame her, given that these people had probably been fighting for their lives for years.

It still set him on edge, though. 

Now, Jacob, this reality’s version of himself, was rambling as he got dressed. 

“I just think it’s so cool,” he said, bouncing up and down. “I mean, you’re from another reality where this didn’t happen, so you must know what it was like, y’know? Before? Also, I don’t know if you’re one of PAMA’s human experiments like Andrew and I, but I think your arm is awesome.”

Jean just grunted in agreement even though he had no idea what the guy was talking about, and pulled the soft grey sweater over his head. 

It was too small. 

He muttered a curse and tugged on the boots he’d been given. At least they seemed to fit okay. 

“Do you think you could tell us more about your home?” Jacob continued to pester him. “I know Lee’s always been interested in the past. Maybe you could take us there sometime!”

Jean suddenly remembered something. 

He had no idea in hell of how to make a portal out of here.

“Shit!” He blurted. 

Jacob raised his eyebrows. 

“Nothing,” Jean growled. 

Perfect. He was stuck in a deadly and dangerous reality with an alternate version of his dead boyfriend, and another version of  _ himself _ that either had an astronomical amount of nervous energy or had consumed enough caffeine to give a water buffalo a heart attack. 

It sounded like the beginning of a joke. 

_ A PTSD-ridden alcoholic amputee, an angry photocopy of his dead lover, and a hyper twenty-year-old child walk into a nuclear wasteland.  _

_ What’s the punchline? _

_ That the alcoholic amputee is from another reality and is probably going to stab someone, since he needs a drink, which he can’t get, and he just can’t take this shit sober anymore.  _

Jean laughed bitterly. 

He wasn’t in the best mood. 

He combed his fingers through his hair again. It still felt odd, not enough resistance against his fingers given that the radiation had caused some of it to fall out. 

Thankfully, it would eventually grow back as his body got used to the radiation, according to May. 

“Come on,” Jacob said, tugging on his sleeve. “There’s dinner waiting. Since you can keep food down, you don’t have to eat that awful hospital mush anymore.” 

———

As soon as he entered the dining room, he knew trouble was coming. 

There was an older woman with sleek dark hair, maybe in her forties, sitting at the table next to a very sullen-looking Andrew. Jacob quickly took his seat next to Lee and leaned against him, grinning. 

Lee just chuckled and nudged him affectionately. 

May, who was sitting in Gill’s lap, gave him a friendly wave, and Gill followed suit, smiling. 

Paige, however, looked up from the pistol that she was cleaning (which Jean was pretty sure was bad table etiquette), and scowled. 

Jean scowled back.

He sat down in the only open seat, the one across from Andrew, who glanced at him skeptically. 

His gaze quickly flicked over his face, down to his arm, and back. 

“Hm,” he muttered.

Then he turned back to his food and continued to eat. 

Jean picked up his bowl and drank some of the broth. It didn’t actually taste too bad. It tasted like chicken soup. 

He noticed the older woman watching him intently. 

“What?” He demanded. 

“It seems like you’re feeling better,” the woman remarked, ladling more stew into her bowl. “My name is Isa. We have some deer jerky too, if you’d like some.”

Jean shook his head. 

Another few minutes of uncomfortable silence followed. 

“Spring is getting close,” Isa said. “Have you made a plan for crossing through the pass yet?”

More uncomfortable silence. 

“No,” Andrew finally said. 

Jean bit his lip, still staring at Andrew’s metal hand. He wasn’t liking the look of how Andrew kept glancing at him out of the corner of his eye, and was noticeably on edge, more so than the others. 

Finally his patience snapped. 

“Can you stop staring?” Jean hissed. 

Andrew’s eyes narrowed. “Where’d you get that arm?”

Jean hadn’t been expecting that. 

“I got my arm cut off by my dead boyfriend’s crazy ex,” he grumbled, shooting him a threatening glare. “My best friend, who’s  _ also _ dead now, built me a replacement so I could still fight. How about you, buddy?”

Something flashed through Andrew’s gaze that might’ve been fear. 

“I don’t like to talk about it.”

Jean’s anger flared. “Oh, so  _ I _ have to talk about a traumatic, life-altering event, but  _ you _ don’t have to?” 

Andrew abruptly sat forward, fury rolling across his face like storm clouds. 

“I’d shut your ass up if I were you,” he snarled, his voice dangerously low. “I’ve been through hell and back out there and frankly, I don’t give a damn whether you live or die. So keep your mouth shut, and I’ll try not to kill you.”

“Kill me?” Jean retorted sharply. “You couldn’t kill me if you tried.”

Andrew shot to his feet, and in the commotion as the others went for their guns, Jean saw Andrew grab a kitchen knife. Jean brought up his metal arm and deflected the blade right before it would’ve impaled his jugular. 

“Andrew!” Isa shouted, her voice commanding silence. 

She looked legendarily furious. 

“Jean, to your room, right now,” she said, her thin face dark with anger. “Andrew, you and I need to have a talk. Now.”


	16. To Find A Drink

Jean felt like a tiger pacing in a cage. 

He didn’t know how long he’d been stuck in here. He knew the whole room by heart now—the thin cot, the table and the two chairs, the small connected bathroom with a grimy mirror above the sink and a toilet, and the single barred window above his cot. 

He grumbled, giving the heavy metal door (it was locked; he’d already tried opening it and he was too weak to punch his way out) another irritated kick. 

He needed a drink. 

He glanced up at the window. The rusted bars looked weak. 

He climbed up onto his cot and grabbed one in his metal hand, and, putting all his weight into it, pulled. 

To his pleasant surprise, the bar bent. 

He spent the next fifteen minutes bending the metal bars to the side, and even though the work tired him out, he managed to bend enough out of the way that he could squeeze through. 

He raised his right hand, made a fist, and punched the glass. 

The glass shattered with a crash. 

Jean grinned in satisfaction, slipping through his new escape route. 

He dropped down from the window to a small ledge on the side of the building, carefully creeping along it, and then onto the roof of a shed, and finally the rest of the way to the ground. 

Jean headed away from the building, which seemed to be an apartment building, and into the city square. It seemed to be late evening, and most of the shops were closed already. 

He headed up to a merchant’s shop that was still open. 

An elderly man was there, packing up crates of bread. He looked up at Jean, raising his eyebrows. 

“I’ve only just started closing up for the night,” he said. “But I’m not closed yet. If you’re here for bread, kid, you can still buy. What would you like?”

“I’m not here for bread,” Jean said. “I need help. Which city am I in?”

He hoped Isa hadn’t been lying. 

The man frowned. “This is Ground Town, kid. Where did you come from that you don’t know about Ground Town?”

Jean froze.

_ Shit! _

“I’m, uh, I’m from out of town,” Jean said, scrambling for an excuse. Then he remembered something May had said. 

“I got separated,” he continued. “From my caravan.”

The man grunted sympathetically. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that, kid. Here, you can have a muffin for your trouble.”

“I don’t have money,” Jean said. 

The man sighed. “I got left behind by a caravan when I was young,” he grumbled. “I barely survived the winter. Have a muffin, kid. And here’s some credits. Good luck out there.”

Jean cautiously took the muffin and the leather pouch full of what sounded like coins, nodded in thanks, and headed off down the street. 

He opened the pouch. 

To his surprise, it was full of rusted and tarnished currency. Nickels, euros, pesos, pounds, all sorts of coins. There were even casino tokens. 

He shrugged, took a bite out of his muffin, and headed in the direction of a small pub. 

He walked in, and wrinkled his nose. 

The place smelled like cigar smoke and rusted metal.

Most of the patrons seemed to be battle-scarred middle-aged men, all of them either ugly, sleazy-looking, or both, and they were all drinking. A few of them shot dirty looks in his direction, but they quickly went back to their card games when they saw Jean’s face. 

Jean had perfected his wolf stare in the Place of No Stars under Mapleshade’s tutelage long ago; a look that simply told any potential threats one thing: 

_ However tough, scary, and bad you think you are, I’m worse.  _

Jean slid onto a barstool, and pulled out a handful of credits, as the man had called them. He placed them on the counter, and the barkeep raised a grimy eyebrow. 

“Gimme something strong,” Jean said. 

The barkeep huffed, and filled a glass with a dark liquid. “You sure you can keep something like this down, kid?” 

Jean scowled. “You want money or not?”

The barkeep rolled his eyes and set the cup down in front of him. 

Jean quickly took a swig, and grimaced, blinking. Whatever was in the glass tasted like lighter fluid, and was probably strong enough to function as such. 

He didn’t care, as long as it kept his emotions at bay. 

He had to figure out a way out of this goddamn reality, and as soon as possible because he honestly didn’t want Jesse and the others to get hurt. 

Suddenly, a hand grabbed his shoulder. 

Jean stiffened. 

“Fuck off,” he snarled. 

Before he could react, he was yanked around to face his antagonist: A burly man with long, scraggly hair and beard (the latter of which was tastefully decorated with the remainders of a meal or two), and several missing teeth. His accomplices looked equally scruffy.

They all had at least one weapon. 

“Ooh, this one’s got himself a pretty face,” the man said, sneering. “Aside from all those scars. Wonder how much credits we could get for ‘em.”

Jean noticed the barkeep duck into the kitchen, and he could guess why. 

“I said, back off,” he repeated. 

The man faltered slightly at his stare, but cackled, pulling out a gun. “A pretty face like yours’ll get us plenty of credits from the pleasure ring, won’t he, boys?”

His accomplices chuckled gleefully. 

Jean made a face. 

Oh, so  _ that  _ was what they planned to do with him. Sell him into prostitution for the rest of his life. Either that, or kill him and harvest his organs if his scars happened to diminish his sex appeal enough. 

Neither option was appealing. 

“This is your last warning,” Jean growled. “Back the fuck off before you do something that you’re gonna regret.”

The man bared his teeth in a grin. 

“Pretty boy, you come quietly, now,” he chuckled. “Or we’ll have to make ya, and you ain’t gonna like that one bit.”

Jean sighed. 

“Okay,” he grumbled, slipping his jacket off and setting it on his stool. “I guess you wanna do things the hard way.”

He lashed out quickly, kicking the man hard in the face. A nasty crunch rang out as the man smashed spine-first into a table, and the other patrons dove under their tables as his gun misfired, the bullet hitting an incandescent ceiling lamp with an even louder bang than the gunshot. 

The man’s accomplices attacked, except for a few who wisely scattered. 

Jean made quick work of the others. 

He had a natural battle prowess. After all his adventures, after all that time running for his life on the daily and training under Mapleshade by night, he’d become one of the strongest fighters on his old team.

He was a machine, a tool, as Mapleshade had called him, the night he’d finally rebelled against her. 

The woman’s words came back as he fought, just making him angrier. 

_ “You, boy, are nothing but a weapon; a killer. You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that doesn’t change its nature. You were born to kill and destroy, and don’t you forget it!” _

One of the men managed to catch him on the jaw with a switchblade. 

Jean snarled in pain and rammed his metal fist into his throat, crushing the man’s windpipe and breaking his neck with ease. 

Another tried to shoot him, but his shot went wide and hit Jean’s metal shoulder. 

He whipped around, ignoring the bullet sparking off vibranium. He grabbed the man’s arm and broke it in one quick movement, snatched the gun, and put a bullet into the man’s skull before he could regain his footing.

He had grabbed a chair and was about to slam it over one of the men who hadn’t fled when it happened. 

A knife sank into his thigh. 

He screamed in pain, losing his grip on the chair as a red-haired man wrenched the knife out and prepared to stab again.

He never got a chance. 

Jean elbow-slammed him in the face, knocking him to the floor and quickly snapped his spine. 

Then the chair rammed into him, slamming him against the bar. 

_ Damnit, I didn’t kill him! _

Jean wheezed, trying to stand, but the man who’d first approached him slammed his head against the counter. 

“You fight good,” the man snarled, jamming his throat against the edge. “You work for those dirty PAMA dogs, don’t you, pretty boy?”

“I— _ ack _ —d—d— _ ghhgk _ —“ Jean choked out, thrashing frantically. 

The man was just too big and strong, and his metal arm was pinned at an awkward angle, so he couldn’t move it. 

Then, out of nowhere, a gun went off. 

The man went limp. 

Blood sprayed. 

Jean gasped for breath, throwing the man off him, rubbing his throat. He glanced down at his thigh. The stab wound didn’t look great, but he’d hopefully be able to walk at least—

He froze. 

Andrew was standing in the doorway, lowering his gun, an irritated look on his face. 

“Isa told you to stay in your room.”

Jean scowled. 

“I needed a drink,” he snapped, grabbing his jacket off the barstool. “Some creeps attacked me. Big mistake.”

Andrew huffed.

Jean thought he saw his gaze flit down his body before he turned quickly.

“You’re hurt,” Andrew grumbled, casting him a disdainful look. “C’mon, we need to go back to Isa’s place so we can fix up your leg. Also, we noticed how you ripped the bars off your window. Do us a favor and don’t do that again, because replacing them is expensive.”

Jean just scoffed. 

He yelped when he tried to put weight on his right leg. Now that the adrenaline from the fight had worn off, it felt like there was molten lead in his veins instead of blood; the latter of which was oozing down his thigh. 

“Here,” Andrew grunted, and held out his arm. “Lean on me. You definitely aren’t gonna get far on that.”

Jean rolled his eyes, but slipped his jacket on and leaned on Andrew.

Then the barkeep stuck his head out of the kitchen like a frightened deer, glancing around warily. Jean watched as Andrew pulled out a handful of credits and tossed them on the counter. 

“For your trouble,” he said, and turned. 

As they limped back to the apartment building, Jean couldn’t help but admire Andrew’s prosthetic. From what was visible, the thing was flawless grey steel, delicately made and impeccable engineering. Similar to his own, in many ways, aside from the construction material. Jean guessed that they didn’t have vibranium here. 

Then Jean noticed something. Andrew’s arm was engraved with swirling tribal markings, mimicking tattoos. 

“Hey,” he said. “I like your arm.”

Andrew made a noise halfway between a laugh and a snort. 

Jean gritted his teeth. “Look, man, I’m sorry I was being such a dick to you at dinner,” he said. “I’m just… this place is stressing me out, and it reminds me—“

“I lost my arm to PAMA,” Andrew said, cutting him off. “They’re this organization that survived the bombs somehow. They’re almost like some type of government. Except they’re trying to ‘improve the human race,’ whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. They’ve been kidnapping kids and experimenting on them. I was fifteen when they took me, when they took my arm and turned me into… this. I escaped, and I’m decently sure they think I’m dead now, but I’ve always had nightmares. Of them… of them finding me again and catching me.”

“What did they do?” Jean asked. 

“Well,” Andrew sighed. “Like I said, they cut off my arm. Gave me all sorts of stimulating injections that made me grow abnormally fast, then put me and… what did she say, a hundred-something other kids through brutal physical training, and during that they injected us with enhancement drugs. So many died.”

Andrew went silent. 

Damn. At fifteen, this guy…

“Y’know, we aren’t too different,” Jean said. “Just a few years ago, and this is gonna sound crazy, but I got manipulated and mind-controlled by a psychotic undead alien lady with a serious crazy ex-girlfriend complex.”

The words just spilled out of him, easier than any other time he’d tried to talk about what Mapleshade had done to him. Somehow, talking to Andrew wasn’t as stressful. 

He went all the way back to the beginning, when he’d crashed the  _ Corellian Chrysanthemum  _ on Archidae, telling the story in full. Then, when he got to the part about how he’d punched Mapleshade in the jaw the night he’d cut his ties with her, Andrew  _ laughed.  _ The sound sent a strange, warm, tingling feeling shooting through Jean’s chest.

Now that he was thinking clearer, not scared and angry, he realized Andrew wasn’t as grumpy as he’d seemed. 

In fact, he was actually quite nice. 


	17. The Alchemist

Jesse yawned.

He was resting against… something. 

A pillow?

Then it shifted, and an arm slipped around him, fingers tangling in his hair. 

He suddenly realized what it was, a rush of embarrassment flooding through him. 

Lukas mumbled something in his sleep, and Jesse felt his face flush as Lukas’s lips grazed his forehead.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Phoebe grinning at him. She clearly could tell exactly what emotions he was currently trying to suppress, judging by the smug look on her face. 

“Not a word,” Jesse hissed. 

Phoebe held up a bag of bagels.

Then she tossed one at him, and missed. The bagel bounced off Lukas’s forehead. 

Lukas jolted awake, glancing around rapidly. Then he scowled. 

“I was sleeping,” he muttered. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Phoebe said. “I suggest you let go of Jesse before he has an aneurysm, buddy. Also, I found somebody while I was getting bagels who said they can help us.”

———

“I’m Beau, and welcome to the Anchorage Record Shop! How may I help you today?”

Jesse stared at the tall, skinny man in confusion. The guy looked like he’d walked out of an anime show: His short-cropped hair appeared to have been dyed a bright pale blue, his brown skin the color of polished oak tattooed with intricate blue designs. There were also two blue triangles tattooed on his cheeks, like Romelle’s, just below the outer corners of his strangely luminous blue eyes. 

And then there was the matter of his odd clothing choices: a lipstick-pink jean jacket over a black  _ Soft Cell  _ tee that was tucked into a pair of shredded black jeans over bright red fishnet tights. The stark white tennis shoes really tied up the look, and his English lilt just made it three times as bizarre. 

Beau brightened when he saw Phoebe. 

“Are these your friends?” He asked. 

Phoebe nodded. “Jesse, Lukas, meet Beau. They said they could help.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Beau said, holding out his—wait, no, their—hand, grinning. “Just to let you know, I’m nonbinary and I go by they/them.” 

Jesse shook it. 

As he did, he realized just how slender yet incredibly strong Beau’s hands were. 

Something was telling Jesse that they weren’t human. 

“I know of Arai’s plans already,” Beau said, walking over to a shelf of records. “I know how to get in and out, as well as destroying her device, without any casualties.”

“Device?” Jesse asked. “Petra mentioned her opening a portal, but she never elaborated on how.”

Beau nodded. “Back here,” they said, heading over to the door to what must’ve been the back room, only it wasn’t just the back room. Sure, there were crates of records stacked along the wall, but there was a very hi-tech looking table in the center of the room, the tabletop, which appeared to be glass, glowing a faint blue. 

Beau waved their hand over it, and a holographic diagram of what looked like a portal frame popped up. Only this portal frame was made of metal, and there was a big focusing disc or something attached to it. It looked vaguely threatening. 

Jesse noticed Phoebe flinch. 

“Is that—“

“Her portal device, yes,” Beau cut him off. “It’s almost finished. She’s been draining the life forces of Alteans, my species, trying to get enough energy to power it. Then she found out that the life forces of cons are much more powerful, so she’s switched to that. Believe me, I hate her just as much as you do, and I know the stakes. Also, I once was part of her inner circle, so I know exactly how to get inside the facility and destroy the device. In short, I can offer you three some help, but for a price.”

Jesse scowled. “A price?”

Beau chuckled, drawing a record sleeve from a box. “Of course. Why would I help you without any reason to?”

“Seriously?” Jesse demanded, trying to keep his temper. “What do you want?”

Beau spun around, eyebrows raised. 

“You help me, I help you,” they said. “If it’s really necessary, I’m betting you’ll accept my deal. You see, my spear broke the other day, and I need new components for it. I need two of you to go to Denali with me to collect some things I need to repair it. Simple.”

“Okay, first of all,” Phoebe said. “You never mentioned  _ that.  _ Second, we have a deadline. A literal DEAD-line.”

Beau scoffed. “Time is relative,” they remarked. “Especially with all of Arai’s meddling with it. I myself was planning to deal with her, but the only problem is that I don’t have my spear, and that weapon is the only way to get in. Now, what’s your choice?”

Jesse bit his lip. 

He really wasn’t sure how he felt about Beau. Then again, they needed them. If Beau knew how to get in and destroy the device, they were the only option, with Petra currently gone. 

“Fine,” he said. “We’ll come with you.”

“Excellent!” Beau exclaimed, bouncing on their heels, grinning. “As for your yellow-haired friend, he can stay in my shop here and care for my flerken in our absence, as Phoebe told me he’s not in the best condition for fighting.”

Jesse frowned. He didn’t know what a flerken was, but judging by how Phoebe recoiled in fear and anger, it was likely very dangerous.

Or, as Petra would’ve said,  _ fantastic. _

“Oh,  _ hell _ no!” Phoebe yelled. “We’re not leaving him with a  _ flerken!” _

“What’s a flerken?” Lukas whimpered. 

“Yeah,” Jesse added, scowling. “What the hell is a flerken, Phoebe?”

“They’re  _ incredibly _ fucking dangerous, that’s what they are,” Phoebe snapped. “Can devour you in seconds. I’ve had to fight them before, and the only person I’ve met with the balls to keep one as a pet was a really attractive and badass lady named Carol, who sadly already had a girlfriend. But anyway, Blondie here is  _ not _ gonna be left by himself with a creature capable of eating a fucking rhino in one bite, asshole!”

Jesse reflexively took a step back. 

That sounded vaguely unpleasant. 

Lukas looked horrified.

Beau just laughed. “Junebug just needs to be fed twice a day for a few days, at most. I think even a weakened amnesiac could handle that.”

Phoebe hissed angrily. 

“Fine, he can be armed,” Beau relented. 

Just then, a small, fluffy Siamese cat yawned and stretched on top of a stack of crates, bounded down, and began weaving around Beau’s ankles. They chuckled and picked the cat up.

Phoebe, however, made a startled squawking sound and scrambled away.

Jesse glanced at the cat in Beau’s arms, then at Phoebe’s half-terrified, half-enraged expression, trying to connect the dots. 

Flerkens looked like  _ that? _

Tentatively, he reached out and patted the cat’s head. It purred and rubbed its head against his hand. 

“Looks like a normal cat to me,” He muttered, scratching the cat’s ears. 

“This is Junebug,” Beau said. 

Jesse chuckled as Beau handed him the cat. Junebug purred happily as he stroked her fur.

“You sound like a little motor,” Jesse remarked. He grinned. “Hey, Lukas, it’s okay! I think she likes me!”

“Holy shit,” he heard Phoebe mumble. “You are fucking crazy.”

“Hey, I’m not the one who reacted to a reality being called ‘unstable and dangerous’ with the word ‘awesome,’” Jesse retorted, enjoying her scandalized expression. “C’mon, it’s just a cat!”

“Not a cat,” Beau said. “Flerken.”

Lukas looked like he was trying to decide between running away or bursting into tears. 

“Anyway,” Beau continued. “Flerken feed is in that locked metal bin over there, feel free to sleep in the break room on the couch, and you can use the money in the register to buy food. Oh, and you can play as much music as you want while we’re gone, but no jazz. Junebug hates jazz, and she’ll destroy everything around her if you play it. Now, cheerio!”

Before Jesse could respond, Beau snapped their fingers, and the world bent alarmingly before going black.


	18. The Pilot

Jesse snapped back to consciousness in a café, holding a cup of tea. He yelped, jolted, and almost fell out of his chair. 

He glanced down at his clothes, making sure he hadn’t spilled his tea. 

Then he realized someone had replaced his jeans with cargo pants, his tennis shoes with hiking boots, and there was a rainproof winter jacket over his shirt. 

“Good, it worked.”

Jesse jumped, almost spilling his tea for the second time. 

“Jesus,” he muttered, scowling at Beau, who was eating a scone. They looked no different, except their clothes had changed: They had on what looked like a chain-mail vest from a three piece suit over a blue harlequin sweater; their jeans swapped for khaki cargo shorts. 

They looked like a scrawny, blue-haired Latinx elf on the way to someone’s Mortal Kombat-themed dinner party. 

Then Jesse realized. 

“How the hell did we get here?” He demanded. “And what happened to my clothes? And where’s Phoebe?”

“Warping,” Beau said. “I was an Altean alchemist a while back, so I’ve picked up a few skills. I folded space briefly to get us to this café in Denali National Park instantaneously, and apparently the pressure must’ve made you black out. As for the clothes, it took some time, but while you were unconscious I retrieved us some warmer attire.”

Jesse frowned. “You stole them?”

Beau hesitated.

He raised his eyebrows. 

They nodded. 

“What?” Beau huffed. “Those tourists on the last bus clearly didn’t need them!”

Just then, Phoebe rushed up to the table, grinning brightly and carrying a tray of pizza rolls. 

“Good news,” she said. “I got us these for lunch. Bad news, we might have to eat them as fast as we can because let’s just say I didn’t get these legally.”

Jesse whirled around. “Phoebe, what the hell? It’s not a goddamn buffet!”

Beau laughed.

Jesse gritted his teeth. He was beginning to realize why Lukas had always been so stressed out. 

Then a cook came out of the kitchen, an angry look on his face. 

“Shit,” Phoebe yelped. “We gotta go!”

Jesse groaned in frustration, following her and Beau as they quickly left the café, carrying the tray of pizza rolls. 

Outside, Jesse could see that they were in a small parking area overlooking a spectacular view of the mountains. Even though it was May, a good portion of Denali was covered in snow. 

“This is it!” Beau said cheerfully. “Now we need to find a friend of mine. He’ll take us up.”

———

Two hours later, Jesse was sitting on a bench outside a small, rickety shack in the middle of a deserted valley. 

It didn’t look promising. 

“I’m confused,” Phoebe mumbled around a mouthful of pizza rolls. “Didn’t Beau say this would be easy?”

Jesse scoffed. 

In the small amount of time they’d known Beau, he wasn’t sure he liked them very much. Sure, they were charismatic and intelligent, but they seemed aloof and smug, didn’t seem to have great morals. 

Morals made things iffy. 

Just then, the door to the building banged open, and a young man walked out, scowling grumpily. Beau trailed after him, grinning. 

Then he saw Phoebe freeze. 

“Breezewing?” She blurted. “Dude, you died in the Battle of Beacontown! We found your body!”

The man’s scowl deepened. 

He was short but slender, his skin a deep brown like black coffee. His black hair was buzzed military-style, and his nose zigzagged like it’d been broken several times. He looked uncomfortable in his thick wool sweater. 

“I’m Breeze _ pelt,” _ he huffed. 

Jesse raised his eyebrows. This man’s accent was odd, vaguely Japanese, but his words were rough like he wasn’t used to speaking English, even though he sounded fluent. 

“Good to meet you,” he said, and held out his hand. 

Breezepelt glowered at it like it was a dead rat. 

Jesse bit his lip. 

This guy didn’t seem friendly. 

“Beau,” he grumbled. “You didn’t tell me you were bringing alternate versions of  _ those _ two.”

Beau rolled their eyes. “Come on, I’ll pay you an extra rabbit.”

Breezepelt snorted indignantly, but turned and headed towards the shed, beckoning for them to follow. 

“As I said,” Breezepelt said. “My name is Breezepelt, WindClan warrior and leader of the Black Squadron. Welcome to Alaska.”


	19. Hermes

In the weeks that followed, Jean started to concoct his plan. 

He knew, from watching Oona and that girl Katie Holt doing experiments, that if even a tiny piece of Balmeran crystal was moving fast enough, it could pierce the quintessence of reality, ripping through into another. 

Luckily, the time dial Petra had given him was made of it. 

If he could get the thing  _ and  _ himself moving together at at least 150.7 kilometers per hour, as Oona’s research had concluded, he could, theoretically, make it out of this reality. 

Frankly, seeing to it that this reality happened to be pretty lacking in advanced technology, he had no idea how he was going to go that fast. 

He decided to explain this to Andrew one day at lunch while Lee and May were out on a scavenging run, Jacob was babysitting at the hospital, and Paige and Gill were out hunting.

It was weird. With everybody else, Andrew seemed a bit tense and reclusive, and from what Lee had mentioned the guy normally had trust issues. But somehow, over the course of two weeks, the two of them had quickly formed a friendship, despite initially getting off on the wrong foot. 

“It’s really simple, when you think about it,” Jean grumbled, taking a bite of his sandwich, gazing down from the rooftop the two of them had effortlessly scaled about ten minutes ago. “I’d just have to get on a starship to make it work. Or ride one of the FjordClan battle eagles. Or even one of those bullet trains in Europe that go really fucking fast.”

“I have a vague concept of what a train is, thanks to Jacob,” Andrew remarked as he licked the jam off his hunting knife. “But other than that, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Jean heaved a sigh. 

“Starships are like… you know what a plane is, right?” 

Andrew nodded slowly. 

“Okay, try and picture a plane,” Jean continued. “But it can fly into space and go really,  _ really  _ fast.”

Andrew hesitated.

“Oh, that’s what you meant,” he said. “I was picturing a big boat with stars on it for some reason. And what's a battle eagle? I mean, I know what an eagle is.”

Jean huffed in amusement. 

“A while ago, I crashed on an alien planet,” he said. “The folks there domesticated the planet’s eagles, which are the size of tanks. They ride them into battle, kinda like cavalry. In a steep dive, those birds can reach speeds of… about three hundred-ish kilometers per hour, if I remember correctly.”

Andrew whistled. “Damn, that’s fast.”

They sat in silence for a while. 

Then, something in the heart of the city caught his eye. It looked like the skeletal remains of a small freighter, surrounded by rusted walls of ancient sheet metal. 

“What’s that?” Jean asked. 

“The dirigible,” Andrew said. “Ground Town was founded when a dirigible crashed roughly a hundred years ago. It was called Sky City, and the citizens aboard, well, they hadn’t seen the ground since the bombs. They ripped the metal off the wreck to build those walls to keep the people safe, fought off monsters with the guns on the ship, and eventually the Ground Town you’re in now came to be. The remains of the dirigible and the original Ground Town boundaries kinda became a monument to survival and perseverance over the years.”

Jean peered at the airship remains. An idea was forming in his head. 

“Didn’t you once mention PAMA being in possession of technology that even the major cities don’t have access to?” He asked. 

Maybe… 

Andrew’s face paled, and he scowled, tensing. “You’re not suggesting—“

Jean squinted at the wreck, a grin slowly spreading across his face. 

“You’ve got experience with them, no?”

———

They snuck out of the city at nightfall. 

“There’s secret tunnels everywhere under the city,” Andrew said. “Alternate escape routes if the gates are blocked, but they are one hundred percent  _ not _ meant for sneaking—“

“Yeah, yeah,” Jean grumbled, keeping his flashlight pointed at the ground. “You see anything?”

However good PAMA’s security was, Jean didn’t really feel that they could be any worse than many of the places he’d broken into/escaped from. After all, this place was a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and Jean was stronger, faster, and more skilled than anybody in his reality, let alone this one.

That was if you didn’t take Andrew into account, though. With his heightened senses, reflexes, and incredible agility and strength, he was right on par with Jean himself. 

“This is a really bad idea,” Andrew hissed, gripping the back of his jacket in his steel fist. 

They finally emerged out of a steel door in the floor of a barn. 

Jean glanced around. “Which direction did you say? I don’t exactly carry a compass everywhere.”

Andrew scowled at him, his slim face ghostlike in the dim light. 

He pointed down the trail with his knife. 

Jean grinned, and grabbed Andrew’s arm. “Come on, we’ll sneak in, find the info we need, and get out real quick.”

He felt Andrew’s arm stiffen.

“F—fine,” he huffed. “Let’s go. Nearest entrance is the crematorium, near the brickyards. We’re goddamn lucky it isn’t blowing snow out here.”

With that, he marched off into the snow. 

After a few hours of speed-walking in icy silence, Andrew grabbed the back of his jacket and tugged him behind a boulder. 

“We’re here,” he growled. 

Jean peered around the boulder. There was a small building in front of them, maybe fifty yards away. It currently looked deserted. 

“Careful,” Andrew hissed. “Ever since Jacob and I broke out of this facility they’ve upped security.”

Jean scoffed in surprise. “You’re going on about how dangerous these guys are and you two busted out? How the hell did you guys even get caught?”

Andrew stiffened. “Long story. Not important. But it was definitely by luck.”

Jean decided to ignore the fact that he was obviously trying to avoid the topic, deciding instead on checking over his weapons. His rifle was over his shoulder, knife on his hip, sword in his hand. He remembered how pretty much everybody had been both confused and impressed by his archaic choice of weaponry. 

“Ready?” He asked. 

Andrew hesitated, his gaze flitting nervously back and forth. 

Jean grunted in frustration and grabbed Andrew’s wrist, pulling him out from behind the rock and toward the building.

Surprisingly, no alarms went off as they approached the door. 

Jean frowned, inspecting the lock. It was far from complex. Just a regular lock—no, the pins were held in place by miniature electromagnets, and if you tried to pick it, it’d electrocute you. However, there was a small design flaw—a thin crack between the metal cover and the door itself.

“That’s new,” Andrew muttered.

Jean yelped in surprise, almost falling backwards into a snowdrift.

“Geez,” he mumbled. “No need to sneak up on me like that. Okay, let’s see. I’ve seen locks like this before. Mind if I borrow that knife of yours? The blade’s thinner than mine.”

Andrew hesitated, but handed him his knife.

Jean slotted the blade into the tiny crack, and with a squeal of tearing metal, pried the cover off, revealing the locking mechanism, which he quickly disabled.

The door swung inward.

Andrew just stared at it, mystified.

“What are you waiting for?” Jean demanded, tugging on his jacket sleeve. “We gotta go in!”

Andrew rolled his eyes and followed him.

The crematorium itself looked deserted, as far as Jean could tell. The ovens weren’t on, and there weren’t any bodies to dispose of. He was glad, mostly because rotting flesh was close to the top of the list of his least favorite smells. 

Andrew followed him as they slipped through the room and into a stairwell, which probably lead down into the main facility. The guy was acting much twitchier than usual. Every time one of their steps was slightly too loud, or a door made a little too much noise opening, he’d flinch and glance around rapidly, spooked.

Finally, they reached what must’ve been the record room.

Getting the door open was easy enough. It was the doctors on the other side who were rummaging through a box that posed the problem.

For a few seconds, the doctors just stared.

Then one of them went for his radio, but he never got the chance to press the button, given that Jean’s knife had found a home in his windpipe. The other doctor tried to run, but Andrew caught him before he reached the door and snapped his neck.

“Shit,” Jean muttered, staring down at the bodies. “That cut our time here short.”

“I told you this was a bad idea!” Andrew snarled.

Jean ignored that comment and ran over to the shelves. Would information on airships be in the Ds, under dirigibles, or in the As under airships, or in the Bs under blimps, or even in the Fs under flying things?

“Fuck,” he huffed. “Andrew, look in A through M. I’ll take N through Z. We don’t have much time.”

He began to rifle through a crate of file folders.

After about fifteen minutes of searching, Andrew let out a triumphant shout. 

“Found it!”

Jean jolted in surprise, tossing the file on something called  _ Project Pandora _ that he’d just pulled out of the P file to the side, spilling the papers everywhere.

“You did?” He demanded.

Andrew held up a file with a big  _ classified _ stamp on it, grinning. Printed in tiny letters on the file itself were the words  _ Project Hermes.  _

He nodded. “They’re planning something big,” he said. “Looks like they’re trying to build airships, just like you—“

One of the dead doctors’ radios crackled.

“Dr. Ray, do you have the file on  _ Pandora?” _

Jean froze. 

Andrew, however, tensed, fear flashing through his gaze. 

“They still have… shit, they must’ve made another backup copy,” he mumbled, almost unintelligibly. “Jean, have you seen anything with the name  _ Pandora  _ on it?”

Jean nodded. “I dropped the file,” he said. “Here, I’ll get—“

“No!” Andrew hissed, and scooped up the papers, stuffing them rapidly into the folder. “Here, you take  _ Hermes.  _ We need to split up. Don’t wait for me, Jean, just run. I’ll be okay.”

Jean stiffened. He’d heard this kind of thing one too many times before. 

“I’m not letting you get killed,” he retorted. “I made that mistake before, and I’m not gonna let something—“

“Dr. Ray?”

The radio jarred then both. 

Jean snatched it up. “Everything’s fine here,” he said hastily. “Just… uh… having a hard time finding the file!”

He clicked it off. That had only bought them a few minutes, at best. 

“Get outta here,” Andrew repeated. 

Jean gritted his teeth in frustration. 

“You don’t want me to see you fight,” he suddenly realized. “You don’t want me to see you kill. And the  _ Pandora _ file has something to do with you, doesn’t it?”

Andrew’s eyes flashed with surprise. 

“We’ll finish this conversation later,” Jean huffed, tucking both of the files into his backpack. “I’m not gonna leave you here. It’s not an option, Andrew.”

And, before Andrew could protest, he grabbed his arm and frog-marched him out of the room. 

They had just passed a guard’s station, trying to be as quiet as possible, when a man in a PAMA uniform stepped out of a door, holding a cup of coffee. 

For a few seconds, they stared. 

Then the man cleared his throat. “I’ll have to see some ID.”

“Hold on,” Jean said, pretending to reach into his pocket. Then, instead of pulling out his wallet, he pulled out his hunting knife and threw it. 

The man went down, gargling blood. 

“Damn, you’ve got a good aim,” Andrew remarked. “How did you—“

“When you’re under life-threatening pressure, you learn fast,” Jean said, pulling the knife out. He wiped it on his pants and stuck it back in its sheath. 

“Hey! You two!”

Jean froze. 

There were two guards at the end of the hall, guns raised. 

“Step away from the body!”

Jean grimaced. 

“Here we go,” he muttered, slowly standing and raising his arms above his head. Then he caught Andrew’s eye. 

Andrew nodded slowly. 

Then the bullets started flying. 

Initially, Jean managed to deflect most of them with his arm. But then one of them grazed his shin, and he shrieked, leaping back behind a corner. 

Andrew ducked behind a bulkhead and started returning fire. “Shit, they have automatics!” He shouted over the roar of the guns. 

Jean hissed in frustration. He was much better hand-to-hand than in a gunfight. 

He jumped out of his hiding spot, ripped a door off the wall and threw it at the two guards. Then he lunged out and finished both off with a bullet each of their heads. 

Andrew was staring in surprise. 

“What?” Jean demanded. “I’ve been fighting since I was fourteen.”

“Nothing,” Andrew said, quickly looking away. “You’re just… really fast. And strong.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jean grumbled, wiping splatters of blood off his arm. 

They kept moving. 

Three more times, they had to duck into cover and fight off guards, and Jean realized how frightening Andrew really was. He was as agile and dangerous as a wild animal, darting between enemy after enemy with the deadly grace of a cougar, targeting arteries, crushing windpipes, snapping spines. 

It was shocking to watch how easily Andrew could end someone’s life. 

Suddenly Jean realized something. 

That was how people saw  _ him. _

He forced the terror at the realization down as alarms began to blare. 

“Code red!” A radio screeched. “We have a code red! The  _ Pandora _ subject is inside the compound! I repeat, the  _ Pandora _ subject is ins—“

Andrew silenced the radio by crushing it under his heel. 

They kept running. 

By now, Jean was hurting. He’d been grazed by bullets, hit by bits of shrapnel, even trying to clear his watering eyes after getting something blown in his face from a smoke bomb. Sure, the nanites Oona had injected him with years ago accelerated his healing dramatically, but it wasn’t instantaneous, and the fact that they were currently running as fast as they could up countless flights of steep concrete stairs wasn’t helping. 

“We’re almost there!” Andrew shouted. 

“We better be,” Jean growled. “If they don’t kill us, these fucking stairs will!”

Finally, they reached the top: a concrete cube with a frost-caked window and a steel door. 

“No time for lock picking,” Andrew wheezed, shooting out the hinges.

Jean let out a pained chuckle and the two of them punched the door together, knocking it outward. 

They burst out into the snow, panting. 

The cold grey of dawn was breaking over the horizon. 

“Shit!” Andrew hissed. 

Jean craned his neck, trying to see what he was looking at. Then he saw it. 

They were up on a tall, steep cliff, snow forming a cornice below them. There was no way down, except through the facility, or down a small road that was undoubtedly barricaded at the bottom. Far below them, in the distance through a swath of dead forest, was Ground Town, unperturbed by their situation. 

Jean could hear the PAMA operatives making their way up the stairs. 

Suddenly, an idea popped into his head. 

“We have to jump,” he said. 

Andrew’s face paled, which was hard, given that he had a large bruise forming on his jaw. 

“Jean, are you fucking crazy?” He yelled. “The snow’s incredibly unstable here! It’d would bury us alive!”

Jean grinned. In all fairness, his idea  _ was _ legendarily stupid. 

“No, dumbass,” he remarked. “We jump  _ on top of  _ the snow.”

Then, before Andrew could protest, Jean grabbed his arm, got a running start, and hurled himself bodily onto the cornice. 

Nothing happened. 

Andrew, who was lying in a heap in the snow next to him, let out a sigh of relief. 

Then, the PAMA operatives burst out, guns raised and ready to fire, and Jean’s hopes promptly disintegrated. 

“Kill them!” The captain shouted. 

Then the snow crumbled underneath them and exploded down the slope. 

Jean shrieked and grabbed onto a torn-up tree as the avalanche thundered down the slope. Nearby, there was a loud scream as Andrew went careening by, clinging to a large chunk of ice. 

Jean almost burst out laughing. 

But he grabbed onto his jacket as he passed by, landing on the chunk of ice next to him. 

“SHIT! SHIT, SHIT, SHIT!” Andrew was screaming, and before Jean knew what was happening he was clinging to him like an oversized baby koala. 

That was when Jean  _ did  _ burst out laughing, and as they skidded to a halt at the bottom of the slope, landing in a heap in a mound of snow, he realized he hadn’t genuinely laughed like this in years, he thought, gazing up at Andrew’s flushed, bruised face. 

He hadn’t noticed how green Andrew’s eyes were. They were the color of spring grass, and bright with adrenaline. 

Then Andrew started laughing. 

“Holy fuck,” he giggled breathlessly. “Holy shit, we’re alive, you fucking idiot! I can’t believe your colossally fucking stupid plan actually fucking worked!”

“I know, right?” Jean cackled, sitting up and reaching into his backpack. He whooped. The files were perfectly dry, and only a little crumpled. 

“Hell yeah!” Andrew cheered. “Now let’s get moving before they catch up!”

They took off into the forest. 

Jean found himself grinning ecstatically, ignoring the throbbing in his still-healing leg and his bullet wounds. His heart was beating fast, his adrenaline was pumping, and Andrew was running beside him, just as breathless and thrilled and smiling as he was… 

Jean relished the unfamiliar warmth swelling in his heart.


	20. This Feeling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I should clarify that the Warriors characters that make appearances in the story aren’t cats. To make writing them more interesting, they’re shapeshifting aliens called Feli (singular: Felus) that can transform from a form almost indistinguishable from humans to that of a cat at will. I might elaborate on how I picture their societies working in this scenario in later chapters. If you’d like to see a full story with this concept and the main characters being Feli, don’t be afraid to comment because I have a lot of ideas revolving around that subject.

“You two are fucking insane.”

Jean grimaced as May pulled his shirt off and began to clean the wound on his chest where a bullet had grazed him. As soon as they’d shown up, a very agitated and frantic Isa had herded them into the hospital, where they were now, getting cleaned up. 

“How the hell do you heal so quickly like this?” May grumbled. 

“Healing nanites,” Jean said. “They’re microscopic robots that I was injected with. They’re self-replicating and live in my bloodstream. Trust me, your technology isn’t nearly advanced enough to make those.”

May just huffed in irritation.

“Hey, don’t freak out,” Andrew said dryly, from over on the other bench. “We stole information that probably would’ve cost a shit ton of Ground Town lives to retrieve, had we not done it.”

“You didn’t  _ have  _ to,” Lee grumbled, jerking his surgical needle through Andrew’s skin a little harder than necessary. “Isa’s gonna kill you.”

“Yeah, and I bet PAMA’s going absolutely apeshit over the fact that their experiment broke back into the very facility he was taken to… what, three months ago?” May remarked. “Next time, I’m letting you bleed to death.”

“Ow,” Jean said, as May’s needle accidentally snagged his skin. 

The warm feeling in his chest he’d been feeling earlier seemed to have faded a bit, but every time he caught Andrew’s eye and remembered their avalanche, it flickered back, somehow amplified by Andrew’s lopsided smirk; his breathless, raucous laughter; how his dark hair was dusted with snowflakes; his green eyes sparkling with excitement; his warm and surprisingly not-bad-smelling breath fanning his cheeks… 

_ Shit! _

Jean suddenly remembered where and when he’d last felt that warmth. 

Holding Hollyleaf’s hand. 

Listening to Aidan laugh. 

The times he’d kissed them. 

He suddenly found himself thinking about how graceful Andrew was when he fought, his predatory finesse like a wolf taking down a deer.

He could vividly recall the press of Andrew’s body against his own when they’d rolled to a stop at the bottom of the mountain. 

And, for a split second, he imagined if he’d leaned up just a few inches, and—

_ Oh no. _

The warmth was suddenly and rather abruptly replaced by an all-too-familiar, hollow, terrified chill. 

“Hey, uh,” he stammered. “Can… can I go? I, uh, I need to take a piss.”

Lee laughed. 

“Bathroom’s down the hall,” he said. “I’d stay in the building, though. That bar fight you got into, if you combine it with your breaking and entering, kinda ticked Isa off. She can kick ass if she wants to, even Andrew’s.”

May snorted. “She’s practically his other mom, though. I don’t think he counts.”

Andrew scoffed, blushing. 

Jean gulped, and quickly fled the room. 

As soon as he reached the bathroom and locked the door, he frantically turned on the tap and splashed cold water on his face. 

“This doesn’t make any sense,” he mumbled, staring at himself in the mirror. 

He only had one name for these sickening, unforgiving feelings.

Jean gritted his teeth. 

This couldn’t be happening. 

“Remember!” He snarled at his reflection, gripping the edge of the sink so hard that the metal rim crumpled in his right hand. 

Again, he felt like his brain had blown a fuse, but in a different area this time. 

“Goddamnit, Jean!” He hissed at his reflection. “Snap out of it! Think about what happens when you love someone. When you love someone, they die, and it’s always your fault. You can’t feel like this about him.”

He felt tears welling up in his eyes.

He let out a cry of frustration. Things had definitely taken a turn for the worse, and he didn’t know why he’d tried to think that it wouldn’t. 

With a heavy sigh, he headed back into the medical room. 

After they finally were let go, Jean retreated to the room they’d set aside for him. He still felt bad that him having his own room meant that Paige had to bunk with May and Gill, and Andrew had to bunk with Jacob and Lee, but they’d insisted. 

He headed over to the chest of drawers where he’d placed his Walkman and the three precious tapes he’d brought. 

He grabbed a tape at random and popped it into the cassette deck.

Then he put his headphones on and cracked open a bottle of whiskey he’d stolen from the kitchen, and took a swig directly from the bottle as the music started to play. 

In a malicious twist of fate, the song just happened to be  _ Somebody To Love.  _

Jean swore loudly, and took another swig of whiskey.

Just his shitty luck. 

He flopped down on his bed with an exhausted groan, suddenly realizing he’d been out all night. 

By the time the song finished, he’d passed out cold. 

———

“Hey.  _ Psst, _ Jean. There’s dinner.”

Jean yelped and blindly swung his metal fist in the direction of the voice. 

Lee quickly backed away. 

Jean winced. 

“Sorry,” he muttered. 

“Nah, don’t be,” Lee said mildly, picking up the half empty whiskey bottle and making a face, then setting it on the nightstand. “I understand having paranoia. Honestly, I’m just glad you don’t sleep with a knife.”

Jean chuckled bitterly, switching his Walkman off. “Used to,” he said. “I’m better than I was two years ago.”

Lee laughed, then looked at his Walkman in confusion. “What’s that?”

“Oh, this?” Jean said. “A Walkman cassette player. You store music on tape and then you can listen to it on the headphones. I modified it so I don’t have to replace the batteries.”

Lee hummed in acknowledgement, carefully inspecting the wires. Then he set it down, a thoughtful expression on his face. 

Jean pursed his lips. 

Lee was a lot different than Luis. 

Namely, he wasn’t bitter and petty and confrontational, and was instead easygoing, compassionate, and kind, but definitely not a pushover. Also, he was a lot less tense and anxious than that other guy, Lukas.

The difference was uncanny. 

“Anyway,” Lee said, “Dinner’s ready. If you want to, you can come eat. By the way, I noticed you got really tense while May and I were patching you up. If you want to talk about it, we can. I’m good at keeping secrets.”

Jean sighed heavily. Maybe he could talk to Lee. Maybe these feelings were just something else, maybe Lee would know something. 

“I know it’s only been a week since I woke up,” he said. “But I keep getting this funny feeling around Andrew. Like… this warmth. My heart beats faster, and my cheeks get all flushed, and… and I don’t know what to think. I just feel… safe around him. Happy. Which I don’t feel much these days. Do you know if I’m sick or something?”

Lee paused, like he was trying not to laugh, but finally chuckled in amusement, patting his shoulder. 

Jean tensed. 

“Jean,” Lee said. “That sounds like love.”

Jean’s hopes plummeted, and the cold, hollow feeling got even deeper. 

A freezing wave of bitterness washed over him as he realized what this truly meant for Andrew. 

He suddenly found himself laughing, but it wasn’t lighthearted. It was cold with sharp frost on the edges, as harsh and unforgiving as he’d become during the war. 

This hurt. 

This hurt so much. 

“Bullshit,” he snorted. “Every time I fall in love with someone, I suffer. The person suffers. This can’t be real.”

Lee looked crestfallen. 

“That can’t be—“

Jean bit his lip so hard he tasted blood, fighting back tears as he remembered the fates of Hollyleaf and Aidan. 

“Look,” he said, the familiar acidic tone sinking over his voice. “My girlfriend, years ago. I loved her more than life itself, and the day I planned to ask her to marry me, someone I trusted killed her in front of me and I went through six months of being tortured. My boyfriend, who I fell in love with and loved just as much as my girlfriend after I finally moved on, sacrificed himself  _ two fucking weeks _ after I confessed to him. Two weeks, Lee. Two fucking weeks. That was all we got to have.”

He choked back a sob. 

He’d been so blind back then. He’d been so in love with Hollyleaf. He’d been so sure that the war was on the verge of ending, and he’d even gotten a ring. That day, he’d taken her downtown to her favorite park, and then the attack on the seaport and the suburbs… 

He could barely recall everything. 

The memories were too fuzzy with grief and rage to discern. 

And then his Aidan. He’d finally managed to move on from Hollyleaf after StarClan had come to the Alliance’s aid in the huge battle on the edge of Beacontown with thousands of casualties on both sides, and when he’d finally confessed his feelings to him, he’d thought he was safe. 

It had been a big mistake. 

Aidan’s sacrifice ate at him relentlessly. 

He couldn’t afford to be in love with Andrew. Sure, they might get a happy few weeks together, maybe a month or so if they got lucky, but after that… 

He grimaced and buried his face in his hands, dropping limply onto his bed. 

Then he felt gentle arms wrapping around him in a hug, rubbing slow, calming circles on his back. 

“I know,” Lee murmured. “Please don’t tell anybody, but… at this point, I think I’m in love with Jacob. Before Andrew accepted him into our group, things were stressful, and having him around was dangerous. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I know. Love is a volatile emotion, and it can cause problems. I’m not telling you you have to tell him, but don’t get angry at yourself for feeling something like this. Just… try again.”

Jean didn’t have the strength to argue. 

He dozed off again, head resting on Lee’s shoulder. 

When he woke up again, he was wrapped in blankets, morning sunlight streaming through the window. 

He groaned, massaging his forehead. 

He didn’t know what to do.


	21. Worlds Collide

Jesse had only ridden on a helicopter once before in his life. 

That time, it hadn’t been nearly as nerve-wracking, given that the pilot had been a little more attentive, and the helicopter itself hadn’t been on the verge of falling to pieces. 

“Don’t worry!” Beau shouted over the roar of the blades. “Breezepelt is a gifted pilot! In this reality, he led the Black X-Wing Squadron into battle numerous times after Dameron started leading the Red Squadron! He’s one of WindClan’s best; just trust me!”

Phoebe, however, looked rather unbothered by the roaring. In fact, she looked bored.

Jean didn’t know how she was capable of that. 

Then again, at one point she’d mentioned having ADHD, which was probably part of her being so jittery and bored, even on a helicopter that was at  _ least _ a thousand feet in the air, the structure rusty and creaking ominously. 

Jesse gulped and gripped his armrests.

Although the ride had felt like hours, it was probably only thirty minutes, he realized, as they flew down and around the cliffs, towards some train tracks that wrapped around this half of the mountain. 

Only they weren’t normal train tracks. 

They resembled steel monorail tracks, but Jesse had been to Alaska in his reality and they didn’t have a big enough population for any kind of monorail to be very profitable. Maybe in this re—

His mind quickly changed as a gleaming steel cargo train that looked like something out of  _ Star Wars _ zoomed around the corner. 

“Okay,” Breezepelt grumbled. “Get out.”

Jesse glanced down at the train. 

“Hold on,” he said, realizing what they were going to do. The helicopter was flying just above the train, at about the same speed. “Are we—“

“Jumping off,” Beau said nonchalantly. 

Jesse froze. 

Ever since he’d fallen from the Wither Storm, he’d never been a big fan of heights, especially dangerous drops like this. Now was no exception. 

“No,” he mumbled, trying to stifle the terror rising inside him. “Hell no.”

“Come on,” Phoebe snorted. 

Beau tugged open the door, hoisting their backpack onto their shoulder, eyes narrowing. Something in their demeanor had changed abruptly. 

“Let’s go!” Beau shouted. 

Then they jumped, landing with a thud on the train below.

Jesse gulped.

“I—I…” he stammered. 

He couldn’t do this. 

“Hey,” Phoebe said. “I’ll jump with you.”

Jesse took a deep breath, gritted his teeth, and before he could lose his nerve, he stepped out of the helicopter. 

He landed in a crouch, wincing at the pain jarring his ankles. 

“See?” Phoebe said, landing behind him with a grunt. “Easy!”

Jesse huffed in irritation. 

Up above them, the helicopter fell behind the freight train and flew off into the cloudy sky. 

“There goes our ride,” he muttered. 

Then, up ahead, he spotted Beau prying open a hatch on the train car they were on with a wrench. 

“Hey, I need help!” They shouted. 

Jesse carefully wobbled across the train to them, pressing the concealed button on his pin. The comforting weight of his armor blanketed him, along with an exoskeleton of titanium and diamond. 

By the time he’d reached Beau, they’d managed to get the hatch part way open, and inside, Jesse could see… 

“The hell?” He hissed. 

“Stygian Blue,” Beau explained. “The nickname for a highly volatile fuel used in laser rifles and other weapons. I need some of it to repair my spear, and the Alliance controls all sales of it.”

Jesse scowled. “Why not just buy it?”

Beau laughed. “I’m not technically on their list of  _ legal _ buyers.”

Jesse froze. 

This person was… 

“What the hell are you trying to pull on us here?” He demanded, drawing his sword. “I didn’t sign up for—“

A brilliant bolt of red light hit the open hatch, inches from Beau’s leg. They hissed in rage, drawing what looked like a penknife. 

“Guys!” Phoebe yelled. “We’ve got company!”

Several things happened at once. 

Beau’s penknife suddenly transformed into a spear. 

The six humanoids dressed in home-made armor raised their weapons as soon as they landed on the train, four wielding spears and the other two holding electric whips. 

The leather-clad figure raised their sword, and there was a huge flash of red lightning above them. 

Jesse froze in his tracks. 

He recognized the figure, even though their face was masked and their heavy black trench coat obscured their figure.

He could recognize that bandanna anywhere.

It was her, or at least a version of her. 

Then pandemonium ensued. 

Jesse yelped in pain as a bolt of light struck him in the shoulder, melting his armor and singing his flesh. 

Beau was defending the hatch, swinging their spear like a deadly whirlwind. 

Phoebe was facing down both whip-wielding enemies, a furious look on her face as she dodged and parried. 

Jesse ran at the woman. 

She seemed startled, even though all that was visible on her face were her electric blue eyes. However, she effortlessly blocked his strike and knocked him down. 

“Stay down,” she snarled, her voice commanding and dangerous. 

“Petra, I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s me,” Jesse said, scrambling back to his feet. “Just chill! Please!”

Petra narrowed her eyes. 

Then, without warning, she attacked, and if Jesse hadn’t already been on edge from the fighting going on behind him, he would’ve been shish-kebabed.

He was hit by the alarming realization that this wasn’t his Petra as her blade caught him in the ribs and cut right through his armor. 

He screamed in pain. 

In desperation, he hurled himself at her, attempting to grab her arm, but she punched him in the gut.

It felt like getting hit by a cannonball. 

Jesse toppled back, and promptly vomited up his breakfast. 

Then, after the nausea subsided, he realized he was clutching the woman’s mask in his hands. He must’ve managed to knock it loose. 

He looked up at her and gasped. 

The woman’s face was covered in scars, burns covering the right side of her face and a slash running down the other side, exactly like Jean’s, and her short red hair was whipping around her pale face in the wind. 

She pointed her glowing golden blade at him, eyes boiling with rage as she spoke. 

“In the name of the Intergalactic Alliance, you’re under arrest.”


	22. The Message

They were locked in shackles and brought onto a small starship that had landed on the cliff side. 

Jesse sat in his seat, fuming. 

His ribs hurt, his stomach felt like he’d swallowed an angry raccoon, and he was  _ royally  _ pissed off. 

Phoebe, however, was just sitting there glumly, a bandage on her chin, and Beau just looked sullen. 

“I can’t believe we trusted you!” Jesse snarled, straining against his cuffs. “I can’t believe we went along you dragging us into… into this! You never mentioned you were… how did she phrase it?” He spluttered. 

“A fugitive,” Phoebe muttered.

“Thank you!” Jesse snapped. “Fugitive! War criminal! Whatever!”

As Beau opened their mouth to retort, the door banged open, and the woman, this twisted, strange version of Petra, stalked in, regarding them coldly like they were dangerous wild animals. 

“Beau,” she huffed. 

Beau rolled their eyes. “It wasn’t a fair fight, and you know it.”

The woman’s nostrils flared, and her gloved hand slammed into the wall right next to their throat with a loud _clang._

“Keep your goddamn mouth shut,” she hissed. “You know what you did.”

Beau snorted, but fell silent. 

“What did they do?” Jesse asked, trying yet again to loosen his cuffs. 

“I’d stop struggling,” the woman grumbled. “Those cuffs automatically tighten the more you try and get out. But in case you  _ really  _ don’t know, they’re a mercenary, a former correspondent for the Dark Forest, and they’ve evaded capture for more than two years now.”

Beau wrinkled their nose. “I kept telling you, I’m innocent, Red.”

_ Dark Forest. _

Jean had mentioned that. Something about dead murderers coming back to life and trying to avenge their own deaths. And Beau was a former spy?

_ “Innocent?”  _ Phoebe snarled, wrenching at her cuffs again. “I dealt with the Dark Forest in my reality, and they killed almost all my friends. You’re not  _ innocent  _ for giving _them_ information.”

Beau stiffened. “I didn’t have a choice!”

“Tell that to the council,” the redheaded woman retorted, and before Beau could respond, she pressed a button on her wristwatch. 

Beau went ridgid, squeaked, then went limp in their seat, unconscious. 

“Had to shut them up,” the woman muttered. “But I’m gonna give you two the benefit of the doubt and let you tell me where you’re from. Anyway, for the time being you can call me Red.”

Jesse frowned. 

Red looked tired, now that she wasn’t fighting. The strange thing was the hollowness behind her eyes, similar to Jean’s, but her nearly identical appearance to Petra made this even creepier. 

“We’re from another reality,” he said. “Well, different ones. I’m guessing the war happened in yours?”

Red chuckled bitterly. “Yeah,” she said, wringing her hands. “The war cost me a lot. My friends, my girlfriend, my family, my arm… even my sanity. They almost killed me, y’know. The Dark Forest.”

“Well,” Phoebe continued. “In my reality, Aidan, he’s… he  _ was _ my best friend, and Luis, I don’t know who you know him as, but he tried to kill everybody.”

That made Red laugh. 

“Lukas,” she said. “Ha, I can’t imagine him doing anything like that. He was too nice for that. Anyway, he was my best friend. He died. Sacrificed himself for all of us. Aiden… he went bad. But he… he saved himself, in the end.”

Jesse couldn’t help but notice Red’s dismal attitude. She’d suffered.

He winced. There was something in his pocket that was digging into his skin and it was getting irritating. 

“In my reality, the war never happened,” he said, hoping Red wouldn’t yell or get angry. “Lukas—well,  _ my _ Lukas is back in Anchorage. He’s waiting for us.”

Red hummed thoughtfully, pulling off her gloves and picking at her nails with a knife. Jesse got a good look at her metal hand. It looked almost identical to Jean’s except the seams were lined in silver instead of gold. 

“Anyway,” Jesse continued. “My Petra, she got captured by this group called the Phoenix Group. They’re trying to—“

Red scoffed. 

“I know all about them. My good friend Luke disappeared about two weeks ago, and the council is going nuts because his husband and I know that he’d never just vanish without a trace like that, but they’re convinced that his mental health has something to do with it. I’m about this close to ignoring direct orders and going off to find him myself, because Shiro’s too nervous to do it.”

Awkward silence. 

Jesse shifted in his seat. His shackles were pressing that object in his pocket uncomfortably against his skin, and it was digging in. 

He tried to push it aside. 

That was a mistake. The fabric ripped, and whatever it was fell out and clattered across the floor. Red leapt to her feet and backed up. 

Then Jesse recognized it. 

It was the dart they’d found lodged in Petra’s stab wound, the night she’d came back. 

Jesse swore under his breath. Lukas had had it last. He’d probably stuck it in his pocket last night, not knowing what it was because of his damn amnesia. 

Suddenly, the etching on the dart began to glow bright orange. Then the dart popped open, and projected the symbol as a hologram: a bird wreathed in flames, clutching what looked like a tree branch in its talons. 

Then the hologram warped and turned into a shoulder-up view of a man. He looked so exhausted and battered that Jesse didn’t recognize him at first. But then he realized it was none other than the famous movie character  _ Luke Skywalker,  _ except he looked like he was in his twenties and there was a massive strip of burn tissue on his cheek, not to mention he looked like he’d been put through the spin cycle of a washing machine with some rocks and maybe a few feral cats.

“Holy shit!” Phoebe yelped. “I know him!”

_ “Listen, I don’t have much time,” _ the hologram said.  _ “I barely managed to escape my cell, and that’s saying something. Look, you may not be the Petra I know, but I need you to make a run for it and try and find her. Get this message to her. I found something big, something too sensitive to say in this message, but Red’s gonna understand what I mean when I say Arai’s working for the Great Tree,  _ and _ she’s looking for Lions. The ones who can command them. She’s gonna use us like batteries to open a portal through reality, into a perfect world for herself. And as far as I know, the only ones who can command the Lions are us. Go to my outpost to get the info. I am really sorry about dragging you into this, but the fate of existence as we know it is at stake here. Oh, oh shit! I need to—“ _

The hologram glitched out, then started back over at the beginning. 

Red cursed under her breath, and grabbed a little device from her pocket, pointed it at the dart, then put it away. 

Then she crushed the dart under her heel.

“What the hell?” Jesse demanded. 

Red sighed.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I recorded the message. You guys… you guys got yourselves into something bigger than you could ever imagine.”


	23. Chocolate and Whiskey

Jean sighed, wiping the ghoul slime off his sword. 

He’d decided to go on a scavenging run with Paige and Gill today. The pack of ghouls, which were decaying mutations that had once been human, had almost taken a chunk out of Jean’s flesh arm. 

Currently, he was waiting for Isa’s verdict on the  _ Hermes _ file that he and Andrew has stolen a week ago. She’d seemed troubled by the idea of PAMA building airships, that was for sure. 

However, Jean felt exhausted after crashing through the undergrowth and punching pseudo-zombies. 

“You’re tired. You should hand things over to me while you rest.”

Jean flinched. 

“Shut the hell up,” he hissed. “I’m not putting up with your bullshit today.”

He slowly looked up, scowling at the shadowy visage of the man reclining on the couch, filing his nails. 

The man looked identical to Jean in almost every way: The same dark, freckled skin; the same metal arm; the same curly black hair and the same patchwork of scars. The biggest difference was the man’s eyes, darker than pitch with slitted amber pupils that glowed like coals in a fire. 

Shadowfire grinned, exposing his fangs. 

Jean gritted his teeth. Of course this asshole had gained the strength to physically manifest here in the bedroom. 

“I’ve been sharing a head with you for years,” Shadowfire crooned, tossing the nail file aside. “I know how you run things up here. Just lay down and relax. You can rest, Jean. You can have a nice long rest.”

“Learn how to lie better,” Jean retorted. 

He was really hoping nobody would walk in to him talking to empty space. Ever since Shadowfire had managed to project the first time, Jean had had problems. He’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia back at home because of how Shadowfire would whisper to him when he was stressed or tired, or even appearing in front of him like this. 

Most people thought Jean was crazy, considering he was the only one capable of seeing or hearing the bastard. 

“Hey, Shadowfire,” he said icily. “Can you do me a huge favor?”

Shadowfire perked up. “Of course.”

“Get the fuck back to where I sent you and don’t ask again!” Jean snapped, snatching up an empty liquor bottle and hurled it at him. Shadowfire smirked and vanished into thin air. 

The bottle hit the wall and shattered.

Andrew, who’d just opened the door, yelped and shielded himself from the shower of broken glass, backing up. 

“Shit, is this a bad time, or—“

“Sorry,” Jean blurted, suddenly feeling incredibly guilty. “I was… aiming for the trash. I missed.”

“You missed by a long shot,” Andrew grumbled, stepping over the broken bottle. “Good news, Isa agreed to your plan, even though she’s reluctant.”

Jean sighed in relief, even though he was detecting a not-so-great follow-up.

“So what’s the bad news?” He asked. 

Andrew scoffed. 

“We’re gonna have to base at a little outpost in the foothills, maybe twenty miles away,” he said. “Near a really big acid lake. It’s called Novac, and it’s right next to the ruins of this huge, metropolitan city that was buried under the snow for a long time. Isa said it’s full of old world relics, but we’ll have to get moving if we wanna beat the other scavengers there.”

Jean frowned. He’d never liked ruins, given that they were creepy and usually haunted by  _ something,  _ but then again, where else would he find machine parts?

He huffed. 

“Better get moving, I guess,” he said. 

Andrew chuckled. “Yeah.”

Awkward silence. 

Andrew cleared his throat, his eyes darting nervously around the room, his metal fingers clicking on the steel frame of Jean’s cot. 

“Who were you talking to?”

Jean hesitated. 

Should he… 

_ He might get mad. He might hurt you.  _

“Shut up,” Jean hissed. 

Then he remembered Andrew was sitting next to him, and groaned in frustration, massaging his forehead. 

“Sorry,” he said. “Voices. In my head. From Mapleshade. I’ve been dealing with them for years, and sometimes they get loud enough that I have to talk out loud for them to leave me alone.”

Jean grimaced. 

He felt guilty, somehow. 

“Hey, it’s okay,” Andrew said, nervously rubbing the back of his neck where the number PAMA had designated him had been tattooed. “I’m… I’m bad at comforting people, but, uh, I get it. You can’t make them be quiet. I won’t ask about it if you don’t want to talk.”

Jean sighed in relief. 

“Well, we’ve been packing up,” Andrew continued, obviously trying to lighten the mood. “Tonight there’s gonna be a big party. Sort of to make up for the one in heavy winter that got disrupted. You wanna come? Everybody else is.”

Jean frowned, weighing the pros and cons of spending time with his acquaintances. Gill was nice, even though he tended to joke a little too much while under attack or in danger, and May was pretty cool, although her resting face was intimidating and she had a shockingly low tolerance for bullshit. 

Jacob was okay, always willing to help out even though he was scrawny and ill-suited for heavy labor and couldn’t fight hand to hand for shit. He still hadn’t explained the origins of the numbers tattooed on the back of  _ his _ neck, but Jean didn’t mention it since the topic was obviously a sensitive one, guessing by how similar it was to Andrew’s. 

Lee, however, was one of Jean’s favorite people on the team. He was always calm and easygoing, and never pried for details. He was also an expert shot with a pistol, and since he was farsighted, Lee could hit things Jean couldn’t see without a scope. 

Isa, although Jean hadn’t spoken to her much, was nice, too. She had warmed up to him almost immediately, and was a very kind, motherly woman. May had muttered something about her adopting him under her breath. 

Jean had let that comment slide. 

It was Paige that made him nervous, though. She was a dead-ringer for Phoebe, and her habit of watching him like a hawk whenever his back was turned was a little disconcerting. And that knife of hers, the glowing one, was usually in view. She never seemed to smile at him either, or talk to him unless she had to. 

Paige obviously didn’t fully trust him. 

Finally, there was Andrew. Jean was still confused by him. As the days had passed, he’d realized that Lee was right, that he  _ did _ have feelings for Andrew. 

But then again, maybe he could ignore it. Andrew seemed to actually trust him, which was surprising, even if you didn’t count the guy’s past. Having a friend in this hostile environment did make things less irritating. 

“I’ll go,” he blurted, before he could lose his nerve. 

“Great!” Andrew said. “See you there.”

He left the room. 

———

Jean glanced nervously at the bonfire. 

He’d never been fond of flames, which was ironic, considering that he was capable of channeling a giant fire spirit. 

“Hey!” Jacob shouted, running up to him with a mug of hot chocolate in hand, a huge grin on his face. “You came! Do you want some cocoa? There’s plenty.”

Jean nodded awkwardly and took the mug, and sipped it. 

He grimaced in surprise. 

“Kid, I’m pretty sure somebody spiked this,” he said. There was definitely a distinct tang of whiskey. “You sure you can legally drink it?”

Jacob scoffed. “There aren’t any laws about  _ that _ anymore, Jean. Besides, I physically can’t get drunk.”

Jean raised his eyebrows. 

Jacob swallowed nervously. “Long story.”

Jean shrugged and drained his mug. 

“C’mon,” Jacob said, and Jean stiffened as the younger man grabbed his wrist and led him away from the bonfire. “The others grabbed a table over here.”

Sure enough, Gill and May were sitting at a table nearby, and Paige, who looked a bit drunk, was sprawled across the bench opposite to them, her feet propped on Andrew’s lap.

“Found him,” Jacob said. 

Gill brightened. 

“Good!” He exclaimed. “Jean, you said you’ve got… something in your blood that accelerates your healing factor, right?”

“Nanites,” Jean said. 

He didn’t know where this was going, and that made him nervous. 

“Can you get drunk?” May demanded. 

Jean scoffed, remembering the many mornings he’d woken up with a hangover after blacking out the night before, usually after one of his headaches. 

“Of course I can,” he replied. 

“Good,” Paige said, slamming another mug of hot chocolate down in front of him. “Because I made a bet with Gill that you can drink Andrew under the table.”

Jean snorted. “Of course I can beat him,” he remarked. 

Andrew looked up from his mug with narrowed eyes. “Sure you can.”

“Oooooh,” Jacob whispered. 

Jean smirked. “You’re on,” he said. “Just for the record, I’ve outdrank guys twice your size and weight, An.”

He faltered. 

Shit, had he called Andrew  _ An? _

He couldn’t afford to nickname him. 

Andrew scoffed.

Just then, Lee walked up, a tray of steaming hot chocolate mugs balanced on his arm. 

“I got drinks,” he said.

Jean grinned. “Thanks,” he said. “Pass me a mug, will you?”

“Me too,” Andrew said, setting his empty mug aside.

Lee’s eyebrows quirked up. “Gill, what did you start?”

“Drinking contest,” Jean said, and knocked back his mug, wincing at the bitter tang of whiskey and chocolate. 

He had plenty of experience with drinking contests. He’d won his motorcycle that way, as well as his pistol, and it was always a good skill to have in his former line of work. And he’d successfully outdrank aliens whose species had a naturally high resistance to alcohol, so beating Andrew would be an easy win. 

Or so he thought.

They managed to empty the entire tray of mugs in only a few minutes, and Lee had to get up and get more. 

“How about we up the stakes?” May said, smirking. 

Jean nodded. He liked that idea, even though he was starting to feel the effects of the alcohol. “How about if I win,” he said, thinking it over. “You have to buy my first drink at any bar we go to for the next month?” 

Andrew snorted in amusement. “Yeah, and if I win, you owe me a dance.”

Jean froze, dread sinking over him. 

“You’re kidding,” he spluttered. 

“Nope,” Andrew teased, giving him a smug look. “I win, we go dance for at least one song. Deal?”

Jean hesitated. His emotions were currently in a free-for-all wrestling match. 

“What, you chicken?” Paige taunted.

Jean could feel his face burning as Gill arched his eyebrows and gave him a knowing smirk. 

“Deal,” he grumbled. 

Jacob cackled and took a sip of his hot chocolate. “Jean, your face—“

“Hush,” Lee said, setting down another tray of mugs. “You’ll make him stop making that face and it’s really funny to look at. Andrew, what did you say?”

Andrew giggled, which was very out of character for him. 

“Homeboy’s losing,” Gill chuckled. 

They finished off another tray of mugs. 

By now, Jean was feeling very tipsy and everything felt fuzzy around the edges. He licked his lips, trying to get the last of the chocolate. 

Andrew looked even more wasted. He was actively leaning on Paige now, and he had a groggy expression on his face. 

Jean smirked. 

He looked so _ hot  _ like that. 

“Whatcha lookin’ at, Orion?” Andrew sang, giving him that adorable lopsided smirk. 

For some reason, that was hilarious. 

“Your face,” Jean replied. “Your pretty, pretty face, that’s what.”

Andrew started giggling again. 

Jean couldn’t help laughing too. He felt so happy and warm, and his mind had gone pleasantly numb from the liquor. 

And Andrew was sitting across from him, his beautiful green eyes almost glowing. 

He loved him  _ so fucking much. _

“Round three is here,” Lee said, setting his tray down. “Jesus, Andrew, you look like you’re gonna pass out.”

Jean snorted and took a mug, and, making eye contact, tried to chug it, which was a big mistake. He knocked the mug back too fast, got hot chocolate up his nose, choked, coughed, then fell off the bench. 

Then he threw up in the snow. 

He heard a burst of laughter above him. 

Jean winced, sneezing at the sour smell of vomit and whiskey, and hauled himself back onto the bench. 

“Real funny,” he mumbled, slumping against Gill. 

Wait, that wasn’t Gill. His stupor lifted for a split second as he suddenly realized he was on the wrong bench, leaning heavily on Andrew, who had just slammed his empty mug down on the table. He was drunkenly grinning.

Jean felt his face flushing red. 

“You,” Andrew slurred, poking him in the chest. “Owe me a dance, mister.”

Jean hiccuped, trying to scowl, but he couldn’t. Andrew’s smile was infectious, and he was so  _ warm. _

“C’mon, dipshit,” Jean grunted, wrapping his arm around Andrew’s waist. “You wanted a dance, so you’re gonna get a dance. Jesus, why did I agree to this?”

“Because my face is pretty?”

More laughter. 

Then they were loping over to the dancing circle, arms around each other. It was awkward, considering that Jean couldn’t remember the steps and kept tripping over Andrew’s feet, and that Andrew kept giggling like a five-year-old, but Jean didn’t give a shit. 

Despite the cold, he felt so warm and so happy, wrapped up in Andrew’s arms. 

Then his feet hit a patch of ice. 

With a shriek, he lost his balance and fell, dragging Andrew down with him, and then they were lying in a tangle of limbs in a snowbank, laughing like idiots. 

Andrew looked so pretty, and he was so close… 

Before Jean realized what was happening, Andrew’s lips were on his, and he was  _ kissing  _ him.

God, everything was so warm and light, and Andrew’s lips and tongue tasted like whiskey and chocolate, and his muscled body pressing him into the snow felt burning. Jean almost laughed out loud and kissed him back, ignoring the screaming from tiny part of him that was still sober.

Then Andrew suddenly jerked away, a horrified expression on his face. 

“I shouldn't have done that,” he stammered, scrambling back to his feet and stumbling away and out of sight.

Jean groaned in frustration and hauled himself up, staggering after Andrew. Then he tripped over his own feet and fell into the snow again. 

“An?” He yelled, and giggled. He liked that nickname. 

“An,” he snorted, getting up and stumbling back towards the table. Maybe that was where he’d gone. 

He flopped down on the bench. 

No Andrew, just May squinting down at him in confusion. 

“Where’s Andrew?”

“Dunno,” Jean mumbled. “Can’t find him, and we never finished dancing. Holy hell, he’s so pretty, May. I wanna kiss him again.”

Gill laughed. “Aw man, Jean’s drunk as a skunk, you guys!”

  
“Skunk,” Jean repeated, fighting back laughter. For some reason, that was  _ really _ funny, he thought, as his consciousness faded to warm darkness.


	24. The Truth

Jean woke up to a pounding headache. 

He groaned. The last time he’d drank to the point of blacking out was the year after Aidan’s death and the end of the war, when getting drunk had been his only strategy for blocking out the voices and the nightmares.

He massaged his temples and stood, limping into the bathroom, where he filled and drank a cup of water. 

Then he threw up in the toilet. 

He ended up repeating the process twice more, until he finally brushed his teeth in frustration and collapsed on his bed again. The memories of the party last night were hazy. 

But he remembered one thing. 

“Oh god,” he mumbled. 

Andrew. 

He’d  _ kissed Andrew.  _

Well, technically Andrew had initiated it, and they’d both been drunk off their asses, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened, and worst of all, Jean had  _ liked  _ it. 

This was bad. 

He groaned, rubbing his eyes. 

There was a knock at the door. 

“Fuck off,” he muttered. 

The door opened, and—oh, fuck—Jacob walked in, holding a mug in one hand. 

“Knew you’d have a hangover after last night,” he said. “I made tea. Also, you were giggling and passed out in Gill’s lap. It was hilarious.”

Jean scowled. 

“You’re awful cheery,” he mumbled, taking the mug of tea. 

“Well, like I said, I physically can’t get drunk,” Jacob said, sprawling across the couch. “Also, when we carried you back to the apartment, Andrew was drinking tequila straight from the bottle and started babbling about how he was in love with you, and then he started crying when we took the tequila away. I mean, at least he  _ doesn’t _ have alcohol poisoning, but—“

“What did you say?” Jean hissed. 

Jacob paused. “He… he didn’t get alcohol poisoning?”

“No,” Jean muttered frantically. “No, before that. What did you say he said when you came back?”

Jacob laughed. “Oh,  _ that.  _ The poor asshole was laying on the couch, drinking tequila and going on about how he’d fucked up. Then we took the alcohol away and he just collapsed on Lee’s shoulder and started crying about how he was in love with you and how he’d made the bet because he wanted to dance with you, and THEN he started bawling his eyes out when he got to the kissing part. And yes, I know about that, especially because Andrew got pretty detailed about sticking his tongue in your mouth before he finally passed out.”

Jean felt like his stomach was being twisted in knots. 

“This doesn’t make sense,” he mumbled, even though it made  _ perfect  _ sense. 

Andrew was  _ in love with him. _

Or something like that. 

“Well, the thing is,” Jacob continued. “I haven’t been able to find him. His room was empty this morning.”

Jean grimaced. 

He knew where Andrew was. 

———

Scaling the building wasn’t quite as easy with a hangover, but Jean managed. 

He saw Andrew almost as soon as he made it to the roof. The guy was sitting with his legs dangling off the edge, hunched against the chilly wind with his back pointedly turned. 

Jean bit his lip. 

Their impending conversation likely wasn’t going to be very pleasant. 

“Hey,” he said. 

Andrew didn’t respond. 

“Don’t do that,” Jean growled, walking up and sitting next to him. “I know you can hear me perfectly fine.”

Andrew opened his mouth, but then he shut it, refusing to meet Jean’s eyes. 

“Well?” Jean hissed. “Are we gonna talk about it, or are you just gonna sit here and ignore me?”

“What do you want to hear?”

Jean flinched. 

“The truth,” he replied. “Jacob told me what you said. I wanna know if how you said you feel about me is true.”

Andrew’s expression darkened. 

_ “Well?”  _ Jean snapped, feeling the edges of the brick crumbling in his grip. “What’s going on with you? I’ve been emotionally manipulated on multiple occasions in my life and I don’t want you to—“

“I don’t know!” Andrew snarled, slamming his fist on the bricks. One of them cracked into pieces, and Jean flinched away. 

“I don’t know what this is!” Andrew continued, anger roiling in his voice. “I’ve never felt like this before, Jean! You make me feel happier than I’ve ever been and I shouldn’t be feeling like this around someone like you!”

“Someone like  _ me?” _ Jean retorted, a sickening feeling of guilt sinking over him. “Is there somebody you  _ should _ be feeling like… like  _ this _ around?”

“Paige!” Andrew blurted. “I’ve had a crush on her since I was a kid. The feelings were there but they’re barely a fraction of the intensity of what I’m feeling for you! Wh—when you came along, well, something changed, and what I felt for Paige, it just… fizzled out. And this is wrong; I shouldn’t feel like this about somebody as weird and confusing as you,  _ especially  _ somebody who’s not even from this reality! What if that breaks something? What if I end up jeopardizing the universe? Besides, I… I don’t even understand  _ how _ this is happening because while PAMA had me, I lost touch with my emotions and they turned me into a goddamn sociopathic lab rat! I can’t really love anyone or anything, Jean. These feelings can’t be real. I… I was just drunk, or—“

_ “Well why won’t you FUCKING try!” _ Jean snarled, getting to his feet. 

Something had broken inside him. The rusty wire holding the cork in place over all his pent-up emotions had finally snapped, and it all came rushing loose at once, along with his words. 

“Mapleshade turned me into a shell of the person I used to be!” He shouted, fighting back tears. “I was a mess! I was barely keeping it together! I tried to kill myself _three fucking times_ after I broke free from her, Andrew, because I saw myself as a threat to the Alliance. You’re doing a much better job coping than I am, too, because for two and a half years I was depressed and angry and I cut myself off from everybody I had left because I was afraid they were all gonna die like my girlfriend and then my boyfriend did! I started drinking to cope and I was drunk almost every fucking day for almost a year and now I’m struggling with that too and I didn’t know I was still capable of even forming a new friendship when I met you! But now I’m experiencing these feelings again and I don’t know what to do because the only other two times I fell in love with someone, they both fucking _died, _Andrew. Because of me.”

Jean realized he was hyperventilating. 

Andrew was just staring at him in shock, clutching the hem of his shirt. 

“Jean…” he said. “Jean, I—“

“Don’t fucking talk to me,” Jean snarled, and swung down over the edge and climbed down the building. 

Then he stormed back inside. 

He ran into Lee on the way in, who tried to ask him something, but Jean just shoved past him, bolted to his room, and slammed his door shut and locked it. 

Only then did he finally let himself break down sobbing.


	25. Mount Feyran

According to Red, she was supposed to take the three of them back to the headquarters in Whittier. 

Only she didn’t set a course for Whittier. 

“We need to go to Seward,” she said, fiddling with the controls. “Luke’s lab is in the area. Or I’m guessing what’s left of it is, anyway.”

Jesse didn’t bother to ask. 

He was shocked. Not only had he found out that Beau was actually a war criminal, but the characters in the movies he’d watched as a kid were not only real but knew him. 

Well, a version of him. 

The Beau situation was by far the most troubling. They were currently locked up in the cargo hold, with Phoebe guarding them, so hopefully they were under control. Jesse wasn’t sure what made him angrier: that they had lost valuable time, or that Lukas was trapped,  _ alone,  _ in the record shop with only a foggy recollection of who he was. 

“You okay?” Red asked.

Jesse realized the pencil he’d been fiddling with had snapped in half. 

“I’m fine,” he muttered. 

Red slowly turned her chair around, an eyebrow raised and arms crossed. 

“Suit yourself,” she said. “As someone in my position, I know when someone’s ‘fine,’ and honestly I’m not buying it when you say that. You’re a lot like my Jesse. Except I don’t know if you own a pair of booty shorts that say ‘Chick-Fil-A wants me dead’ across the ass.”

Jesse froze, suddenly remembering that he had a pair of neon pink booty shorts in his chest of drawers that said exactly that back at home.

“What does that have to do with me being fine?” He asked. 

“Oh, you  _ do _ have those!” Red exclaimed, sitting bolt-upright. “I had a feeling. You see, there’re probably events that’re constants as well as people, like you owning booty shorts or lions or—shit, I forgot to take my meds this morning.” 

She pulled a prescription bottle out of her jacket and dry-swallowed a few of the pills.

“Sorry,” Red said. “I’ve got ADHD. If I don’t take my meds regularly I tend to get a little… spacey.”

“It’s cool,” Jesse said. “Axel—well, my Axel—he’s got that. I have to remind him sometimes about—“

He trailed off. 

Red had gone still, or mostly still given that her fingers were still fiddling rapidly.

She had a strange, faraway look in her eyes, like she was seeing something that he couldn’t. 

“Axel,” she murmured. “Your Axel, he’s… he’s still alive?”

“What do you mean?” Jesse said. “Of course he’s alive. He’s been leading Boom Town for a while now. I mean, I never saw him as a leader, but—“

“My Axel died,” Red said glumly. “I could’ve stopped it.”

A tense, uncomfortable silence followed. 

For a moment, Jesse just stood there in surprise. Back in Jean’s Beacontown, there’d been a memorial for the Axel and Olivia there, or Alex and Oona, as the plaque had read. He hadn’t given it much thought, though, and Phoebe was just too different from Petra to really connect it to home. 

But with Red, who was almost a carbon copy of the Petra he knew… 

He tried to imagine a life without his two oldest friends. A life without Axel’s bad jokes, a life without Olivia’s snide comments, a life without their banter and laughter.

He couldn’t. 

He’d met Axel when he was seven years old. The guy had been a late bloomer, a shrimp of a kid, skinny and gangly and short and below average physically. Jesse, who’d been tall for a first grader, had always stuck up for him, even if it meant getting beat up. 

That had lasted all the way till ninth grade, when his growth spurt had finally kicked in and he’d shot up past six feet in only a year, surpassing Jesse whose growth spurt had hit early and had remained only five feet six since. 

Jesse couldn’t help but smile as he remembered holding objects above Axel’s head in sixth grade. 

He hadn’t known Olivia quite as long as Axel. He’d met her for the first time in fifth grade, when he and Axel had let her join their group for their history project, and the three of them had been friends ever since. He’d gotten close with Olivia in high school, especially during the tense months after she’d came out as gay to her family. They hadn’t been quick to accept her, but at least things had worked out in the end. 

Now, Jesse thought back to the building contest in his junior year. He’d been seventeen and naïve when he’d run into Petra after Reuben had run off, when he’d had to go through the pain and terror of destroying the Wither Storm. 

Oh god, Reuben… 

He hastily shook the memories away. 

Now he was twenty-five, having travelled through the portal network at barely eighteen and then pissing off, fistfighting, and defeating God at twenty-one. 

He’d come so close to losing the ones he loved  _ way _ too many times. 

Now everything was in shambles again.

Petra was missing, Lukas had become amnesiac, and he was sitting in a hi-tech spacecraft with a war criminal and two  _ alternate reality versions of Petra,  _ trying to stop her former employer from destroying all of existence. 

Typical. 

The monitor beeped, jarring Jesse out of his thoughts. 

“We’re getting close,” Red said, thumbing the controls. “Fair warning, this might freak you out. Luke happened to set up a hideout in a literal mass of sentient metal that consumes pretty much anything that sets foot inside it.”

“Wait, what?” Jesse yelped. 

Then, all of a sudden, a bizarre, ragged metallic hum filled the air. Jesse shrieked in surprise. It felt like the noise was tugging on his brain. 

“What the hell was that noise?” Phoebe shouted, bursting through the door, a frenzied look on her face. 

Red winced and massaged her temples. 

“The signal,” she said. “Have any of you seen the TV show  _ She-Ra?  _ Specifically, the Beast Island episode in season 4?”

Dead silence. 

“Well,” Red sighed. “The creator of the show is an Altean. She based the idea of Beast Island on Mount Feyran. Mount Feyran is an old, abandoned Altean garbage dump near the opening to Resurrection Bay. The magical remains of skulltrite, Balmeran crystal, alchemy-infused metal, and other stuff has become partially sentient over the centuries it’s existed. Anything that stays there for an extended period of time gets… uh, consumed. The metal wraps around the thing, kills it if it’s alive, and begins to melt it into the structure. Luke’s basically a walking nuclear bomb, so the amount of energy he puts out is the only thing keeping him alive in there. The last time I went, I saw human remains stuck in the walls. Believe me, it’s not a pleasant way to go, especially with the signal.”

“Signal?”

Red groaned. “If anybody in the team  _ other  _ than me watched that show—never mind. It’s a pulse the island sends out, and it gets worse the further inside you are. Draws biological creatures that set foot on it to the center, and it dulls your resolve. Leeches your energy and makes you want to stay there so it can… consume you.”

Jesse shuddered. How the hell had Luke managed to build a hideout there, even with his powers on his side?

“Oh!” Phoebe said, her voice going up a few octaves. “Okay! Uh… fun!”

Red scoffed. 

The hum suddenly sounded again. 

Jesse flinched. 

Red, however, noticeably shuddered and grimaced, like the sound was painful. 

The ship touched down, and Jesse realized they were floating on the cold grey ocean, maybe three hundred yards from a massive island that looked like it was made entirely from twisted, melted metal. 

Then he realized it  _ was  _ metal. An incomprehensibly large mass of fused metal, riddled with holes and warped patches that were  _ glowing. _

“Holy shit,” he mumbled. 

  
“Welcome to Mount Feyran,” Red said, grabbing her jacket and putting it back on. “Leave Beau in the cargo hold. Those cuffs are programmed to give a heavy dose of tranquilizer if you try to remove them, so they’re not gonna go anywhere. Get your weapons, because the things that  _ can  _ survive down there are definitely not friendly.”


	26. Lion’s Roar

The whole place was unnerving. 

Jesse kept tripping over sinewy tendrils of metal as they headed into the huge structure, into the cave system. The walls of the place were warped and bulging, the metal shaded from grey to black to all sorts of colors, all melted into one piece and overgrown with those tendrils that seemed to be gradually fusing with the walls themselves. 

He felt an uncomfortable chill. 

Suddenly he was hit by a horribly rank stench as the entered a larger cavern. 

“Oh god,” Phoebe muttered. 

As if on cue, the signal came again, louder and more grating. 

Jesse flinched again. The tugging was more insistent this time. It felt like something was drilling on his skull. 

He grimaced. 

Red, however, gritted her teeth and stumbled, leaning on her sword. 

“Sorry,” she grunted. “Oh, hey, look over there. That’s a Northern Ice-Scale Dragon. Must’ve flown in here and gotten trapped.”

Jesse winced. The mass of festering flesh in front of them barely resembled a dragon. It was stuck in the wall, and the metal was slowly overtaking the massive body. The wings looked more like giant, arching sheets of metal than wings. 

“Can we get moving?” Phoebe grumbled. “I really hate the smell.”

“‘Kay,” Red said. “But we need to stop and eat soon, though. We can’t afford to get tired in here.”

They kept going. 

It was hard to tell how long they were walking for. The place was disorienting, with the strange shadows and the trapped things and the signal buzzing every few minutes. 

Jesse saw a lot of trapped things as they walked. He saw the remains of many animals; moose, goats, orcas; even creatures he couldn’t identify. There were the remains of people, too. It made him flinch every time he passed what was left of a person. With no plants or animals or insects to speed up decay, the corpses looked very fresh. 

And gross. 

There were melted remains of boats, planes, even spacecraft, all fused with the walls. 

By the time they made it to a cavern to rest, they’d had to fight off a pack of vicious little mouse-like creatures with huge teeth. Bleeding and battered, they devoured their lunch. 

But not Red.

She just sat there, staring at her food. 

Jesse was about to ask her what was wrong when it came again. 

The signal. 

It was more intense than any other time before. Jesse shrieked in pain, clamping his hands over his ears. Phoebe lurched and whimpered. 

But Red bolted to her feet, eyes wild. 

“Gotta… gotta get… get out…” she mumbled, stumbling away. “Need… need to…”

She fell to her knees, and Jesse watched, horrified, as the tendrils started winding themselves around her legs. 

“No!” He shouted, leaping to his feet and unsheathing his sword. 

“No… no point,” Red muttered, her eyelids drooping, a dismal expression on her face as the tendrils wound higher, around her waist. 

Jesse ran over, frantically sawing at the tendrils with his sword, ignoring the horrible grinding from the signal. 

“I’m… I’m so… tired…”

Jesse whirled around, panic flaring inside him when he saw Phoebe slumped against her pack, the tendrils winding around her torso. 

The signal sounded again. 

“Goddamn it!” Jesse shouted, slamming his sword against the tendrils twisting around Red’s shoulders and neck. 

Suddenly the tendrils were wrapping themselves around his wrists.

He yelped and struggled, but it was no use. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the tendrils pinning Phoebe to the ground, and she wasn’t moving. 

The tendrils were going up his legs. 

Red’s head jerked back as the tendrils crawled up her face, her eyes dull as she mumbled weakly. 

She looked so much like Petra… 

Jesse screamed. 

He’d never screamed like this before, he thought, suddenly sensing a tingling feeling in his hands like a power surge.

Were they… 

_ Glowing? _

Then a dam inside him broke, and the whole world was shaded white as silver flames exploded outwards from his body, burning away the tendrils. 

Red wheezed, scrambling to her feet.

Phoebe shrieked. “Jesse!”

Jesse stared at his hands. 

He  _ was  _ glowing. 

Then, in his ears, he heard something. It was a deep rumbling sound, like a growl. 

Then it was gone. 

“Jesse?” Red breathed. “Jesse, do you know what this is?”

Jesse swallowed nervously. 

“No,” he finally said, trying to calm the shaking in his voice. “No, I’ve never had this happen before.”

That was mostly true. The only other time anything like this had happened was when he’d defeated Romeo, when he’d thrown the fireball right back at him with energy buzzing in his ears.

“Jesse,” Phoebe said, something frightened in her voice. “Jesse, you channeled the power of a Lion. And not just any. The fucking White One.”

Jesse bit his lip, resisting the urge to say,  _ as opposed to the Pink One? _

“I… I don’t get it,” he said. 

“This is big,” Red mumbled, wringing her hands nervously. “This is really, really big. And really dangerous.”


	27. A Dark Dream

The ride to Novac was tense. 

They were in a large armored truck (according to Isa, it had been stolen from PAMA and had the tracking device removed), so they didn’t have to walk. 

Jean, however, ended up in a seat  _ right next to Andrew. _

He really didn’t want to talk to him. 

Also, it had been a while since he’d been able to get at least  _ one  _ drink, and Jean was feeling unpleasant. 

“Hey, uh,” Andrew said hesitantly. “Jean, are… are you okay?”

“Don’t talk to me,” Jean snarled. 

He felt shaky and cold, but for some reason he was sweating. He also felt restless and jumpy, and there really wasn’t anything to cause it. Then, of course, there was the pounding headache he had. 

“Does anyone have whiskey? Or something I can drink?” Jean growled, massaging his forehead. 

“Nope, sorry,” Gill said. “We left all the booze back in Ground Town. We need to keep a clear head out here.”

Jean groaned, cramming himself into the corner of his seat. 

“Oh, I think you’re experiencing withdrawal,” Andrew said. “That explains the shakiness. Do you want some sedative or something? We were allowed to take some medical equip—“

He couldn’t deal with this bullshit. 

Not now. 

He was angry. He’d admitted something he’d been denying, but out of spite. 

And he’d told Andrew about his suicide attempts. He hadn’t opened up to anyone about it except for his Aidan, who’d saved him from himself after Mapleshade’s manipulation and torture had turned him into a broken mess of a person who couldn’t convince themselves that they were still human. 

Jean remembered each attempt with vivid detail. 

The first time; overdosing on pain meds. 

He’d woken up in the hospital with an IV in his arm and horrible stomach pains, listening to the incessant beeping from the heart monitor. 

The second time; jumping off the roof of the hospital, a good hundred feet or so off the ground. 

A security drone had caught him and brought him safely to the ground. 

The third time had hurt the most. 

Frustrated that nothing was working and furious that no one would let him put himself out of his misery and rid the Alliance of the security threat he posed to them, he’d gashed open his wrist, hoping to bleed out. 

Aidan had found him and dragged him back to the hospital. Jean remembered waking up to his love holding his hand, fast asleep in a chair. 

He’d finally given up trying to kill himself. 

But he’d never opened up to anybody about the attempts, he’d never told anyone how he’d been feeling except for his Aidan, his beautiful, kind, and understanding Aidan. 

Who was gone. 

Jean couldn’t believe he’d told this angrier version of him the truth. 

“Don’t fucking talk to me!” Jean spat.

Andrew flinched, the apprehensive but hopeful look on his face disintegrating. 

He looked genuinely hurt. 

Jean somehow felt bad. 

“Okay look, I don’t know what the hell happened between you two, but Jean, stop being a dick!” Maya snapped. She then proceeded to shove a small pill bottle into his hands. “These are a drug called  _ diazepam,” _ she explained tersely. “Take two pills.  _ Never _ take more than six within twenty-four hours, got it?”

Jean nodded irritably and shook two of the tiny white pills into his hand, and then he dry-swallowed them. 

After a few minutes, he felt drowsy. 

He yawned and leaned against the car window, but that was uncomfortable, so he leaned against the person sitting next to him. 

At this point, he didn’t care who it was, as long as they let him nap. 

———

_ He jolted upright.  _

_ Jean realized it was another dream. _

_ Only he was standing in a clearing in a foggy grey forest of skeletal, leafless birch and poplar trees, the only light coming from the glowing fungi on the tree trunks. The sky was pitch black, no moon or anything.  _

_ The Place of No Stars.  _

_ A horrible, wrenching feeling swelled in Jean’s gut as he whirled around.  _

_ “Wha—why—“ _

Who brought me here? How did they bring me here again?

_ “You seem troubled,” an achingly familiar voice, honey-sweet and as gentle as his late mother’s said. “I am so sorry for everything I put you through, Jean.” _

_ Jean could feel panic setting in.  _

_ “Sorry, my ass!” He yelled, unsheathing his sword, trying to keep from hyperventilating in terror. “Come out where I can see you!” _

_ Cruel laughter echoed from the treetops.  _

_ Then the shadows coalesced into  _ her _ —or what was left of her.  _

_ Mapleshade’s body had been jaggedly split in half. The normal half was riddled with cracks that were glowing blue, and whenever the fabric of her clothes came in contact with one, it burned away just a little. The other half was just a steaming cluster of shadow that was barely retaining the shape of a woman’s body. Her left eye, the one in the shadow half, glowed pupil-less blue. _

_ “You’ve let yourself go,” Jean muttered.  _

_ Mapleshade narrowed her eyes.  _

_ “I’ve grown strong,” she growled, her voice sucking the little warmth there was out of the air.  _

_ Jean realized he could see his breath.  _

_ “The shadows of the universe that my essence was banished to is a very powerful and forgotten energy source,” Mapleshade continued lazily. “It bound what little of my consciousness that was left together. That blasted girl. Arai, she calls herself. I managed to… ah, influence her. The portal she’s building, it’s for me, not her. I’m so proud to say that the life force of your former lover will be the first I consume when I gain my new body!” _

_ “You better leave what’s left of Aidan alone,” Jean hissed, “Or I’ll pop a cap in your ass before you can blink.” _

_ Mapleshade chuckled.  _

_ “Still such a naïve little child, even after all my teaching,” she purred. “What was the first thing I taught you?” _

_ Jean gritted his teeth.  _

_ “Never trust your conscience,” he muttered. “Or your feelings, or your instincts. Nothing is what it seems.” _

_ “Exactly,” Mapleshade said.  _

_ “Okay, what does this have to do with anything?” Jean demanded. “All that ‘lesson’ did was make me paranoid, and why the hell are you even here?” _

_ He was getting tired of this.  _

_ “I’m not dead,” Mapleshade said. “Your Aidan may have used his power to destroy my physical body and dissolve my essence, but I’m still partially alive, waiting. Arai, she’s making me a new body, slowly but surely, and very soon I  _ will  _ cross through that portal and go home.” _

_ Jean felt a horrible wrenching feeling deep in his gut.  _

No. 

_ She couldn’t be back.  _

_ Just the idea, just having proof that his tormentor was still alive and trying to destroy what little he had left…  _

_ It terrified him more than anything else.  _

_ “I won’t kill you tonight,” Mapleshade continued, a ghost of a cruel grin spreading across what was left of her face. “No, I’ll let my living servants deal with you. I want you to watch everything you still love suffer and die, just like what happened to me. I want to watch  _ you _ suffer knowing that you brought on their deaths. You remember what you are?” _

_ Jean’s self-control snapped.  _

_ “Shut your goddamn mouth!” He screamed, and threw his sword, impaling Mapleshade through the chest.  _

———

The dream shattered, and Jean sat up so fast he smacked his head on the back of the driver’s seat. 

“GAH!” Gill yelped. “Jesus!”

The car swerved on the icy road. 

Jean suddenly felt a cold, cold feeling down in his gut. He glanced around frantically, wrenching his knife out of the sheath and pointing it at nothing in particular, forcing his panic down. 

“Where the fuck are you?” He snarled. 

“Jean!” Lee yelled. “Calm down! Put the knife away!”

Jean froze. 

His panic dulled. 

He was back in the car. Andrew, Lee, Paige, and Jacob had crammed themselves into the corner, as far away from the blade of his hunting knife as possible. Jacob in particular looked terrified, and Andrew looked very unnerved. 

Jean winced and lowered his knife. 

He still felt the cold feeling. 

“Something’s happening,” he blurted. 

Suddenly, Andrew leaned past him, glancing wildly out the window. 

“Gill, stop the car.”

“Huh?”

“I said, stop the fucking car!”

Then, a muffled screech echoed from outside, and the world flipped upside down as the car was thrown into the air.


	28. A Dangerous Discovery

They hit the ground in a horrible crunch of twisted metal and breaking glass. 

Jean got lucky. 

When the car was thrown, the roof had been ripped clean off. As the rest of it soared down the road, he tucked and rolled, hitting the ice and skidding several feet before crashing into what was left of a wheel. 

Then the  _ thing _ jumped over him, pursuing the wreckage. 

Jean groaned and sat up.

He could feel blood leaking down his forehead, and his right ankle hurt a lot. 

Then he saw the creature. 

May, looking like she’d fallen into a paper shredder, was trying to hold it off with an automatic rifle. The beast howled in rage and stumbled back, but shook off the bullets and kept coming. Meanwhile, Paige and Andrew were trying to drag an unconscious Gill out of the flaming wreckage of the car, and a battered Lee was carrying an equally battered Jacob. 

What struck Jean was the terrified looks on their faces, and how quiet they were. 

Then he remembered something Andrew had told him when he’d ventured outside Ground Town for the first time. 

_ Enderman. _

Eight feet tall, pitch black and hideous, irradiated to the point of killing you slowly if it managed to bite or scratch you. Nearly bulletproof hide, and incredibly fast. Almost blind, but very sensitive ears and nose. 

On top of the food chain out here. 

By now the thing had almost made it to May, fighting its way through the spray of bullets and screeching in fury, and Jean made a snap decision. 

He wrenched the emergency blaster pistol out of the holster on his belt (that he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to use) and fired it straight up. 

The enderman screeched and wheeled around. The sound of the energy weapon was obviously louder than May’s automatic. 

Jean held his breath and fired again, drawing his sword.

The enderman roared and charged. 

He met it halfway, ramming the razor-sharp diamond blade right into its concave stomach as it leapt over him. 

A deafening screech followed.

Jean hit the ground, dragging his sword out with him, avoiding the acidic shower of enderman blood as it crashed to the ground, wailing. 

Before he could chase after it, Andrew, Paige, and May were all charging it as it tried to stagger off, all three of them unloading as many bullets as they could into its head, until it finally stopped screaming and went still. 

“Hey!” Jean shouted. “I had it!”

Before he could react, Andrew, pale with terror and covered in bleeding cuts and scrapes, threw his arms around him in a hug.

Jean yelped, trying to pull away, but Andrew just held on tighter. 

“That was the  _ craziest fucking thing I have ever seen,”  _ Andrew growled, his voice muffled by Jean’s shoulder. “No, you don’t get to fucking go. That was fucking stupid and I need reassurance that you’re not dead, fucking insane bastard.”

Jean could feel his face burning. 

Then he caught Lee’s eye, and the blond arched his eyebrows, his lips quirking into a grin. 

Jean stiffened and pushed Andrew away, narrowing his eyes. 

Andrew faltered and took a step back. 

“Okay, can I point out that Jean would’ve single-handedly taken out a fucking  _ enderman _ had we not started shooting at it?” Paige yelled, waving her rifle. “With a fucking sword! A motherfucking  _ sword,  _ you guys!”

“I’ve fought worse,” Jean muttered, suddenly catching sight of Gill laying where Paige had had to drop him. He was groaning and trying to roll over. 

He headed over, and grimaced when he saw the damage. 

Gill’s arm was badly broken, and he was bleeding everywhere. There was—oh god—a chunk of glass stuck  _ in his eye. _ And, to make matters worse, his shoulder was dislocated.

“Shit,” he breathed. 

Jean quickly knelt, braced the joint, and before anyone could stop him, he popped Gill’s arm back into place. 

“Here, let me help,” May said, her voice icy as she began wiping the blood off Gill’s face. Jean started to tell her to sit down because she was almost as badly injured as Gill was, but her warning glare made him change his mind. 

“Andrew, go find me something to make a splint,” May said. “Hurry.”

A long ten minutes passed. By then, they’d managed to stop most of the bleeding and set Gill’s arm. 

By now, Jacob had regained consciousness. For someone who had just been in a horrible car wreck, the guy was completely unscathed, which was straight up miraculous—had he been unscathed to begin with. 

His wounds, which had been almost on par with Gill’s, had all healed up in a matter of  _ minutes. _

Emotionally, however, Jacob looked badly shaken. 

“So what’re we gonna do?” Andrew asked, his voice full of anxiety. “Novac doesn’t have a hospital, and we’re about ten miles away from Ground Town. We can’t just leave—“

Jean sighed and thumbed a button on his belt. A small metal chip popped off into his hand, and he mumbled the command word under his breath. 

He really didn’t want to use his one emergency transport, but it  _ was  _ an emergency. 

The chip began to glow, and then expanded magically into a small hovercar painted with blue and white racing stripes. 

“Take that,” Jean grumbled. “It’s the only emergency transport I have. Just tell it where you want to go, and it’ll get you there, but it’s single use because the magic is so unstable.”

Dead silence. 

“I’m going back to Ground Town with Gill,” May said tensely. “Help me get him in this thing.”

For a moment the others just stared in dumbfounded silence. 

“Well?”

After a few minutes, the hovercar shot away, carrying its passengers. 

Now Jean was standing in the road next to the flaming wreck of their armored car, an enderman corpse, and his four remaining acquaintances. 

“Uhm, now what?” Lee asked. 

“We get to Novac,” Andrew said. 

“Vague,” Paige muttered. 

Jean rolled his eyes and started walking. 

“Hey! Wait up!” Andrew yelped, running to keep up with him.

Jean sped up, ignoring him. 

He was so tired of this shit. He’d been in Ground Town for two months now, and he had the blueprints for his escape. He couldn’t afford to waste any more precious time, because if Mapleshade had been telling the truth, he had to think fast and work even faster, and Andrew’s mere presence was grating on his nerves. 

“Jean, slow down!” Lee yelled. “Look, Jacob can still barely walk. I know you’re used to this kind of thing, but—“

“Here’s the thing,” Jean snarled, whirling around. “I. Don’t. Care. Existence as we know it is in danger, and y’all need to pull your heads out of your goddamn asses and keep moving!”

“Why the fuck am I supposed to believe you, Orion?” Andrew shouted. “You fucking drop into my life out of nowhere and put my friends in danger, all the while fucking with me emotionally and you just expect me to believe everything you say? How fucking delusional are you?”

Jean could hear the fear in his voice. 

And Jean was angry. 

No, not angry. 

Furious. 

He felt a cold, malicious feeling of contempt boiling in his stomach. 

_ He doesn’t know what you’ve been through. He’ll never know your pain.  _

Jean snarled in unbridled rage, spun around, and viciously swung his fist at Andrew with full intent behind it. 

There was a loud clang as Andrew’s metal arm deflected the strike. 

And then they were fighting for real, fists flying, and then Jean saw a blade flash in the weak sunlight.

Now they were wrestling for the knife Andrew had pulled out and Jean shrieked in pain as Andrew slammed his head into the ice. 

His rage exploded. 

Jean grappled Andrew around the waist and dragged him to the ground, locked his vibranium hand around Andrew’s steel arm and pinned it to the road, and wrapped his other arm around his throat and began to squeeze. 

Andrew let out a muffled howl, writhing desperately. 

Jean could feel the cold, malicious glee boiling in his veins as Andrew’s pulse pounded against his forearm like the beat of a war drum. 

He could hear screaming; the others trying to stop him, probably. 

He grinned, digging his fingers into one of Andrew’s glass cuts and laughing out loud at his agonized wail. 

He loved causing pain, Shadowfire thought to himself, chuckling gleefully. 

Suddenly the cloud of red obscuring his vision faded, and Jean faltered, the abject horror sinking in as Andrew frantically screamed and struggled in his grip, panicking. 

But before Jean could let go, there was a tremendous roar. 

Pain exploded in his shoulder as something ripped him away from Andrew and slammed him hard into the ice. 

Then he was staring up at the snarling muzzle of a giant, winged blue lion. 

He slowly turned his head in shock. 

Andrew was standing in the road several meters away, fists clenched, a mix of fear and rage on his face. His eyes were glowing blue, like a pair of miniature stars, blue lightning crackling around him. 

Then Andrew shrieked in surprise and stumbled, promptly falling on his ass.

The Blue Lion gave Jean one last threatening snarl, as if to say,  _ I’m really fucking disappointed in you, Orion. _

Then she turned and flew away into the afternoon sky. 

Jean just lay there, horrified. 

Shadowfire. 

He’d referred to himself as _ Shadowfire. _

He’d hurt Andrew. 

_ Oh, god. _

He could feel a horrible, aching, throbbing pain in his gut that wasn’t from any physical injury. 

And Andrew had just summoned the fucking  _ Blue Lion. _

“Jean?” Lee called. 

“Jean, are you okay?”

That was… that was Andrew, his voice hoarse and afraid. 

“Jean!” Andrew said, louder. 

There was genuine panic in his voice. 

“Jean, what happened to me?”


	29. Luke’s Outpost

Apparently, Red didn’t feel like addressing the whole White Lion thing. 

“Hey!” Jesse demanded, chasing after her as she grabbed her pack and marched off down the tunnel. “You can’t just drop a bombshell like that and then not fucking—“

“We’re finishing this conversation later.”

Jesse faltered. 

Sure, Red was an okay person, but she wasn’t exactly a  _ people _ person.

“Jeez, she’s touchy,” Phoebe remarked. 

Jesse sighed. “Well,” he grumbled. “The signal does seem to be affecting her more than us. Do you know anything about this lion shit?”

Phoebe snorted. “Do I? Of course.”

She then launched into an incredibly long and detailed story about ancient aliens and prophecies and magic or something. Jesse had no idea, probably because she’d lost him at  _ Voltron,  _ whatever the hell that was. 

“Can you slow down?” He asked. 

Phoebe groaned in frustration. 

“Okay,” she said. “Short version: There’s six spirits that control the universe, and they take physical form as winged lions. Red, Blue, White, Yellow, Green, and Black. White is by far the most important. A commander of the White Lion needs to be a free spirit; someone who’s capable of following their own rules and fighting destiny. In my reality, our White commander is dead. Well, all of them are, except for Jean and Hawkfrost, who command Red and Green, respectively. You’ve got a power on your side unparalleled by anything in the known universe, buddy.”

Jesse hesitated, mulling over this alarming new information. 

And a giant, partially sentient mass of metal that tried to trap and kill living things wasn’t the best place to do so. 

He had a power on his side unparalleled by anything in the known universe?

He couldn’t wait to tell Lukas. 

Then the signal came again, grating on his nerves but not intolerable. The silver flames seemed to have done something to keep the signal from affecting him quite as badly. 

Then Red stopped, as they emerged into a cavern that was easily twice the size of a football stadium. 

“We’re here.”

Jesse gasped. 

The remains of the ship stuck below them in the metal looked like the U. S. S.  _ Enterprise,  _ straight out of the movies. 

In fact, it  _ was _ the  _ Enterprise. _

“Holy shit!” Phoebe squawked. “I’ve seen some freaky shit, but this is—“

“Yeah, cool,” Red muttered, and jumped from the ledge. 

She slid down, all the way to the engine, and climbed past a mass of tendrils and into the hull. 

Jesse and Phoebe followed her. 

———

The inside of the ship was even creepier than the outside. 

Phoebe tossed him a flashlight. 

“No thanks,” Jesse said, and, gritting his teeth in concentration, managed to get his hands to glow. 

He grinned.

Phoebe scoffed. “You’re so unnecessarily extra. I like it.”

They kept walking. 

When they reached the end of the hallway, they found Red again. She was standing at a closed door, fumbling with a wall panel. She was clearly frustrated.

Finally, she gave up and slammed her metal fist into the panel.

The door opened.

“That… that worked,” Jesse exclaimed.

They headed deeper into the structure, until they reached what must’ve been the warp core containment room back when the ship had still been spaceworthy. Now it was filled with tendrils wrapping around the walls, but they weren’t coming anywhere near the core, given that it was glowing and pulsing still. 

And the whole place was cluttered with various pieces of machinery, equipment, and datapads, and it was all clearly very new.

Red grinned and ran up to a console, and pressed the on button.

“Luke gave me emergency access to his systems before he disappeared,” she said. “I didn’t understand what they were or why ‘till now.”

_ “Voice identification, please,”  _ a pleasant female voice said.

Red cleared her throat. “Red Lion.”

_ “Incorrect password. Voice identification, please.” _

Awkward silence.

“Damn you, Skywalker,” Red muttered. “Red Lion.”

_ “Incorrect password. Voice identification, please.” _

Jesse stifled a laugh as Red made a face that looked like a constipated bear.

“Petra Johanna Wright,” she growled.

_ “Incorrect password. Voice identification, please.” _

Jesse caught Phoebe’s eye. She was obviously trying so hard to fight back her laughter to the point where she was probably going to blow a blood vessel.

“Okay, fuck you!” Red snarled, slamming her hand on the console and putting a crack the screen. “Illogical rat! Bastard woman! Carrots! Naughty bitch boy! I don’t fucking know what embarrassing nickname you put in as my password, but you better fucking let me in, asshole! Goddamn it, Catalyst!”

_ “Correct password. Welcome, Catalyst.” _

The core hummed as the computer system came online.

Jesse caught Phoebe’s eye again.

Then they both lost it.

“It’s like that scene,” Phoebe giggled. “In fucking  _ Thor! _ When the goddamn Quinjet won’t let him in!”

“That’s what I was thinking!” Jesse cackled.

Then, without warning, the white light in his palms flared and a bolt of it shot across the room and melted a hole in the wall.

There was a brief, awkward pause as all three of them stared at the new window Jesse had accidentally created.

“My bad,” Jesse apologized.

He felt a strange sense of apprehension as he stared at his glowing palms. Red and Phoebe were right. He did have something powerful.

Red waved her hand. “Sit down and don’t touch anything,” she grumbled, fiddling with a dial. “Because if I know the paranoid magic twink asshole he’s probably rigged something in here to make the ship explode.”

With that, she turned her back to them and her attention to the console.

After what was probably five minutes, she waved them over. Jesse had no idea what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t what was on the screen. 

It was a list. 

Well, not really a list. It was six columns, each of them labeled.

Column one was labeled  _ DOB. _

Column two was labeled  _ Timeline. _

Column three was labeled _Known_ _Subsets._

Column four was labeled  _ Lion Compatibility.  _

Column six was labeled  _ Bond Strength. _

Column five was labeled  _ Status??? _

“It’s a database,” Red said. “It was in the trash file. I managed to get a copy of the program, though.”

Out of curiosity, Jesse tapped the name input box and typed his. 

The name  _ Jesse Oswalt  _ brought up the following:

DOB: Jan. 30, 1995

Timeline: 0000000001

Known Subsets: Jean Orion, Jacob Owens, Jesse McClain, … (tap for more)

Lion Compatibility: Positive; white

Bond Strength: 97%

Status?? Aware  
  


Jesse thought he saw Red arch her eyebrows in surprise, but if she found any of the information disturbing, she didn’t let on.

  
“Ooh, let me try!” Phoebe exclaimed. 

Name: Phoebe Wilson

DOB: Oct. 13, 1994

Timeline: 0459943196

Known Subsets: Petra “Red” Wright, Paige West, Petra G. Wright, … (tap for more)

Lion Compatibility: Negative

Bond Strength: N/A

Status?? N/A

Phoebe glanced expectantly at Red, who heaved an annoyed sigh and tapped on her name. 

Name: Petra “Red” Wright

DOB: Apr. 10, 1994

Timeline: 0000000035

Known Subsets: Phoebe Wilson, Paige West, Petra G. Wright, … (tap for more)

Lion Compatibility: Positive; red 

Bond Strength: 43%

Status?? Aware

Jesse raised his eyebrows. 

“Red lion, huh?” He asked, leaning on the console. 

Red huffed, pulling her flash drive out of the panel. “Not important. Anyway, we need to get moving. The longer we stay here, the more time we—“

The signal ripped through the calm.

It was  _ horribly  _ loud in here, like a circular saw buzzing between Jesse’s ears. 

Phoebe shrieked and clapped her hands over her ears, and Red stumbled, and fell down into the opening of an empty doorway, and something beeped. 

The voice of a man, obviously a recording, crackled through a small speaker: “Nice try! You’ve got about fifteen seconds before this whole place goes up, so good luck!”

Then an explosion rocked the ship, and the floor tilted alarmingly. 

Jesse yelped and grabbed onto the console. Suddenly he was dangling in the air, it being the only thing keeping him from falling. 

“Damn it!” Red shouted, now dangling from the bulkhead. “That sneaky little bastard! He put the explosives in so that you can come in, but if you try to leave, you’ll trigger the bombs that’ll destroy both the thief  _ and  _ the information! Damn it, how could I be so stupid!”

“We better think of something fast, you guys!” Phoebe yelled. 

Jesse grunted. 

His arms were  _ really  _ starting to burn. 

Another explosion. 

Then Jesse saw the button for ejecting the warp core in the event of an emergency or engine malfunction. If the launch mechanism still worked… 

“Red!” He shouted. “Hit that button!”

Red obliged. 

There was a creaky groan of metal under stress, and for a moment Jesse was sure they were done for. 

Then the floor opened up above them and they were launched into the air. 

“HOLY SHIT!” Phoebe shrieked. 

“WHAT THE FUCK, JESSE!” Red spat.

Jesse grinned. 

Then he stopped grinning when he realized that he had no plan for breaking their definitely fatal free-fall. 

Then… 

They fell into the cargo bay of a starship that had swooped into their path. 

Jesse hissed in pain as he raised his head and sat up unsteadily. He must’ve bumped it on something. 

“Holy shit,” Phoebe was mumbling. “Oh, fuck. Oh, shit, we’re alive!”

Then Red scrambled out of a pile of supply crates. Luckily, she didn’t look too badly hurt.

She looked pissed, though. 

“Jesse!” She snarled, using her sleeve to mop away the blood trickling down her eyebrow. “That was one of the most insane fucking things I have ever seen!”

“I’m sorry!” Jesse yelped, shrinking back.

Red’s face broke into a grin. “That’s a compliment, man! That was most stupid, dangerous, and absolutely unnecessarily dramatic things I’ve ever seen, and honestly, I’m jealous! From now on, Jesse, you have my trust.”

She held out her hand. 

Jesse awkwardly shook it. 

“Uh, Red?” Phoebe said. “Isn’t this little ship  _ your  _ ship?”

Red’s grin abruptly melted. 

She glanced around, and then her eyes narrowed in surprise. 

Jesse suddenly heard a faint whimper. 

He shoved a crate to the side, and there, lying in a heap in shackles and only partially conscious was Beau.

“Didn’t Red tell you not to bother struggling?” Jesse huffed. Then the realization struck him. “Hold on, if we’re all back here, who’s flying this thing?”

As if on cue, a field of blue light issued from the floor in front of him. 

Jesse instinctively tried to run, but he just smacked face-first into the field on the opposite side, and pain exploded through his face as his nose started to bleed for the second time in three days. 

“Gah!” He yelped. 

“What the hell’s going on?” Phoebe yelled. Apparently, the energy field had caught all four of them. 

“Wish I could tell you,” Red hissed. 

“You’re being captured,” a voice said over the intercom. 

Jesse froze. 

He knew that voice. 

“My name is Leo,” the voice continued, sounding almost amused. “And I have orders to bring you to Arai alive, but I have a feeling she won’t let you stay that way for very long.”


	30. Capture

They really had no choice but to sit there. 

Jesse winced as Phoebe dabbed the blood off his face, yelping as the cloth brushed his nose. 

“Hold still,” Phoebe muttered. 

Meanwhile, Red had taken the cuffs of Beau and was trying to question them. 

“Again. Did you let someone on the ship?”

Beau scowled. 

“No,” they muttered. “I’ve been stuck back here. I was trying to  _ warn  _ you Leo had gotten onboard, except that your cuffs tranqued me.”

Red groaned in dismay. 

“We need a plan,” Phoebe said. “I mean, should we make a break for it when he deactivates the shield, or—“

“I wouldn’t.”

Jesse whirled around to face the speaker, who was leaning in the doorway to the cargo bay. 

He looked almost identical to Lukas, which was disturbing. 

The main difference was his eyes, which weren’t blue. They were almond-shaped and a strange, greenish color, and almost seemed to glow with a cruel, cunning light. His hair was bleach-blond (the roots were growing in black) and longer than Lukas’s, slicked back and wavy, and his face was covered in huge, ragged scars. One went over his left eye, which was milky and blinded. 

Jesse shuddered when he saw the resemblance between that scar and the wound he’d put on the face of the Aiden he knew. 

But Leo looked so uncannily similar to Lukas despite the differences that he had to remind himself that this wasn’t Lukas, this was a twisted, corrupted version of him driven nearly insane by envy and greed. 

“Honestly, trying to escape would be a bad plan,” Leo drawled, polishing his fingernails on his shirt and fiddling with the hilt of the sword hanging on his belt. “Who are you, anyway? The boss wouldn’t give me details on who I was supposed to be capturing today.”

Jesse narrowed his eyes. 

He decided on bluffing. 

“We don’t know who you are,” he retorted. “We were just exploring, and… uh… you know, we’re trying to see if there’s prime real estate here.”

Red was staring at him threateningly, as if to say,  _ are you stoned? _

“Yeah!” Phoebe added. “Feyran Real Estate! They’re our client, and you just fucked up a major sale of ours!” 

She jabbed her thumb at Beau, who jolted in surprise but quickly recovered. 

“I was planning on finding myself a beautiful summer home,” they moaned, dramatically leaning on Red, who looked like she was trying to decide between being angry and confused. “And you went and ruined our trip! Thanks a lot, you bastard!”

Leo suddenly looked uncomfortable.

“Seriously?”

Jesse glanced at Phoebe, who mouthed  _ stall him a little longer so I can think of something. _

Either that, or  _ selling antelopes drinks of pumpkin. _

Jesse decided on the former because it made a lot more sense. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Uhm… Guanda here wants a total refund! Do you know how unrealistic that is? We barely get any clients here, uh… Liam, was it?”

Leo scowled. “It’s Leo,”

Jesse pretended to slap his forehead in remorse, stifling a laugh. Then he said, “Of course, Larry.”

Leo stiffened and opened his mouth to speak, but then Beau waved their hands.

“Toby, how  _ could _ you?” They cried, throwing their hands up. “You  _ guaranteed _ me a safe tour, and then we get accosted by some…  _ random!” _

Jesse met their eyes, and arched his eyebrows. 

Beau obviously got the message that he was planning something even more over-the-top and dramatic. 

Jesse carefully slipped the tranquilizing needle into one hand. 

“This was a horrible deal!” Beau wailed, and they swung a fist at him, slow enough that Jesse could easily see it coming but just fast enough to look real. 

Jesse blocked the strike and felt the needle pierce the skin on Beau’s hand. 

They gasped in surprise, the small amount of tranquilizer causing them to lose their balance and fall. 

“Oh my god!” Red blurted, finally deciding to play along. “Guanda’s dying!”

Jesse managed not to laugh as Beau pretended to flop around on the floor like a fish out of water. 

Leo’s face went pale. 

“Shit,” he muttered, deactivating the shield. “The boss  _ said  _ that they’d be here, but if you guys really aren’t… here, uh, Guanda, let me—“

As soon as he knelt by Beau, they sat up and punched him hard in the jaw. 

“Fun fact,” they hissed as Leo toppled back, clearly alarmed as he scrambled for his sword. “My name is  _ definitely _ not Guanda, you ass!”

Before Leo could grab his sword, Phoebe jumped on him, holding him down, but the guy was really putting up a fight. Finally, all four of them working together managed to subdue him. 

Jesse winced, trying to bind Leo’s wrists. 

His nose had started bleeding again.

Then, out of nowhere, there was a loud clanking noise and the ship shuddered to a stop. 

“Nice try,” Leo said, grinning coldly.


	31. Reprieve

Jean stared miserably at his rations. 

“Come on, you need to eat,” Lee urged, pushing the deer jerky into his hand. 

“I’m not hungry,” he muttered. 

Okay, that was a lie. Jean could hear his stomach rumbling. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s breakfast, and his stomach was starting to hurt. 

But he didn’t deserve the food. 

Lee was being too kind to him after what had happened. At least Jacob was appropriately nervous, Paige kept glaring at him, and Andrew was keeping his distance. 

Maybe, if he didn’t eat, he’d end up getting sick and weak enough that they’d leave him behind. 

He’d attacked Andrew, and he would’ve killed him had his brief insanity not been broken by the Blue Lion. 

He’d come very dangerously close to snapping. 

Speaking of Andrew, the man was huddled in front of their breakfast campfire, shivering and gingerly rubbing his throat. He was still pale, and his neck was bruised, and his injuries from yesterday’s car wreck and enderman attack were even more prominent. 

Jean felt sickened by what he’d done to him, what  _ Shadowfire _ had done. 

“Look, Jean, I know you feel really horrible about what happened,” Lee said tiredly. “But you can’t just starve yourself to death. We both know that it was just tension running high and that the adrenaline made you a little crazy. You  _ need  _ to eat.”

“Just save it for somebody who deserves it,” Jean muttered, and pushed past him and walked off into the trees. 

Lee didn’t follow him. 

As soon as he was out of earshot, Jean pulled out his flask. There was barely any whiskey left in the bottom, but he tapped the last drops into his mouth and sat down heavily on a snow-covered log. 

He was so hungry. 

Then someone else abruptly sat down on the log next to him. 

“Andrew?” Jean yelped. 

Andrew held out a tin bowl of oatmeal and a spoon, a cold, contemptuous look on his face. 

“Eat the fucking food,” he snarled, his voice hoarse and rough. “Or I swear to fucking god I’m gonna shove it down your fucking throat.”

Jean started to protest, but he was cut off as Andrew shoved a spoonful of oatmeal into his mouth. 

“Hey!” He choked. 

“You need to eat and I’m not putting up with your reclusive bullshit,” Andrew snapped. “Now eat the fucking oatmeal, and I’m gonna sit here and force you to if you don’t do it yourself.”

Jean scowled, but took the bowl. 

Then he realized how truly hungry he was and devoured it. 

“There,” he grumbled. “Happy?”

“Was it you?”

Jean hesitated before answering. “What do you mean, ‘was it me?’”

Andrew’s angry expression crumbled into an exhausted one. “Did you attack me because of the voices?”

Jean did a double take. 

He hadn’t been expecting that. 

“Yes,” he answered, a lump swelling in his throat.

Andrew let out a sigh of relief and visibly relaxed. “What… what did they tell you?”

“Well, they… they weren’t talking to me  _ then,”  _ Jean mumbled, fighting back his tears. “But the tension, I guess… made me snap. I’m under a lot of stress, and that’s when they try to… to take over my mind. And… and then…”

He wasn’t able to finish his sentence because he lost his composure and burst into tears. 

Then, out of nowhere, Andrew had wrapped his arms around him. 

“It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m here for you.”

Jean flinched, feeling that strange tugging feeling in his gut again. 

This felt weird. 

He remembered the last time he’d gone berserker. He’d been tranquilized, put in solitary confinement, and yet another restrictive red mark had been added to his legal papers. No one had been allowed to see him for three whole days, and even then he’d had armed guards with him for another week. 

The Garrison most certainly hadn’t shown him kindness. 

But now, the victim of his attack was hugging him and reassuring him, telling him that it was gonna be okay and that he was here for him. 

He’d forgotten what this was like. 

And as Andrew stroked his hair, gently rocking back and forth in a soothing rhythm and murmuring gently, he realized that the warmth he kept feeling had returned. 

“C’mon,” Andrew said wearily. “We need to get back to the others.”

———

They made it to Novac by afternoon. 

They set up camp just outside the outpost’s wooden walls. Lee started setting up a fire to cook up some dinner, and Paige went out to hunt. 

“Go into town,” he told Andrew. “We’re running low on bandages and ammo.”

“Got it,” Andrew replied. “Hey, Jean, you feeling up for coming with? I could use some help.”

Jean swallowed nervously and nodded. 

“Sounds like a plan,” Lee said mildly. “If you find any more dried oatmeal, get some. We’re running low on that, too.”

They headed into town. 

“So,” Jean finally said, managing to work up enough courage. “This a date?”

Andrew laughed. “Of sorts.”

Jean rolled his eyes. “What do you mean by  _ of sorts,  _ you sneaky bastard?” He joked, elbowing him. 

“No need to get pissed,” Andrew said, elbowing him back. “It’s a surprise.”

Jean rolled his eyes. 

At least things were starting to thaw between them, he thought, as they headed through the gates and into the tiny marketplace. 

There, they separated. Andrew went off to buy bullets and bandages, and Jean used the handful of credits Andrew had handed him to buy some oatmeal. Then, as an afterthought, he stopped by another shop and bought a bottle of whiskey. 

Then he spotted Andrew at a nearby booth, waving wildly. 

Jean bit his lip to keep from laughing. 

“You got the ammo?” He asked, walking over. This booth seemed to be a place to trade and sell pre-bomb memorabilia and items, Jean realized, catching sight of all the day-to-day toys he’d seen sitting on the shelves. 

“Yep,” Andrew said, hefting the sack on his shoulder. “Do you think you could explain what some of this stuff is? I wanted to get something for Jacob.”

He set his sack down and took a small object off the shelf that Jean recognized. 

Jean laughed. “That’s a Rubik’s Cube,” he said, taking the faded toy. The colors were still visible, and when he twisted it, it seemed to work fine. 

“A what?” Andrew asked curiously. 

“Rubik’s Cube,” Jean repeated. “It’s a puzzle game. You have to try to twist it so that each side is a solid color.”

Andrew hummed thoughtfully. “You think Jacob might like it?”

Jean shrugged and peered at the shelves. Then, as he was pushing aside a pile of ancient fidget spinners, he hit the jackpot.

“Aha!” He yelled, holding the cassette tape above his head. 

Andrew looked incredibly confused. 

“Cassette tape,” Jean explained. “They go in my Walkman. Ooh, I wonder what’s on this one? Maybe some Bon Jovi—“

“What’s a Bon Jovi?”

“Never mind,” Jean said, chuckling. “I think we should get the Rubik’s Cube for Jacob, or maybe… ooh, how about this?”

He held up the small plastic box filled with dozens of lego pieces. 

Andrew frowned. “I don’t know what those are, Jean.”

Jean scoffed. “They’re legos. Little plastic bricks that… you know what, you’ll see. C’mon, let’s check out.”

They ended up buying all three of the items they’d picked out. 

By the time they reached the campsite, dinner was already finished and it was almost dark outside.

“Where have you been?” Lee demanded. “We were worried.”

Then Jacob jumped up, eyes wide with amazement. 

“Is that—“

“Legos,” Jean said. “We stopped by a pre-war shop and Andrew thought you might like something.”

“Oh my god, thanks!” Jacob exclaimed, hugging him. 

Jean reflexively stiffened, and then realized that Jacob was exactly the same height as him. 

Paige, who was lounging against her pack, snorted in amusement. “Jean, he’s almost taller than you.”

“You shut your whore mouth,” Jean grumbled, wriggling out of Jacob’s enthusiastic grip. 

Lee chuckled. “Alright, you all need dinner. Sit down.”

Dinner was a lighthearted affair. 

Jean ended up setting his Walkman up and putting on some music for everyone, and then he realized that this was the first meal he’d had in years where he was not only not alone, but also comfortable with his acquaintances. 

He liked the feeling. 

Halfway through, Andrew ended up pulling out the Rubik’s Cube and solved it in a whopping eight seconds. 

Jacob just stared at him, dumbfounded. 

“Okay, what the fuck?” Jean demanded, staring at the cube in Andrew’s hand. 

“What?”

“I had one of those!” Jacob said indignantly. “I was never able to finish it, like ever, and you can solve it  _ that _ fast?”

Andrew shrugged. “It’s fun.”

Jacob scowled. “Gimme that.”

Jean tried not to laugh as he snatched the cube and started messing it up, a determined look on his face. 

He poured himself some more whiskey. He’d decided to limit himself now, no more drinking until he was throwing up, no more going through a whole bottle in only a few days. 

Then, as he was nursing his drink, he suddenly felt Andrew’s arm hesitantly settle around his shoulders. Jean jumped, but mostly because it was his metal arm and the steel was surprisingly cold against the back of his neck. 

But for some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to push it away. 

It felt nice. 

“Well,” Lee said, stowing the now empty cooking pot in a bag. “I’m gonna tie the food stuff up in a tree. It’s getting late and we need to get out scavenging first thing tomorrow morning.”

Jean awkwardly cleared his throat. 

“Look,” he said, finding it difficult to say the words. “You guys don’t have to stay if you don’t want to. You’ve got enough on your plate already, so if you don’t want to help me anymore, you can head back to Ground Town.”

“No,” Andrew said. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m staying with you.”

“I am too,” Jacob said without hesitation. 

“Same here,” Paige said, gesturing at Andrew with her knife. “I need to keep  _ his _ ass out of trouble.”

Andrew rolled his eyes. 

“I will, too,” Lee said. “I might start heading back in maybe a week or so to check on Gill and May, but I’m definitely committed to this.”

Jean couldn’t believe it. 

They were  _ staying.  _

Even after the whole Enderman Incident. 

“Thanks,” he blurted. “I… this means a lot to me. Not a lot of people like to stay with me because… well, I’m—“

“Temperamental?” Paige suggested. “Stubborn? Uncooperative and abrasive?”

Jean sighed. “Yeah, that’s fair.”

“Anyway, bundle and huddle?” Jacob asked, pulling open the tent flap. 

They all crawled into the tent. 

Jean understood the logistics of sleeping in a pile like this, but he wasn’t used to physical contact and was incredibly paranoid about not being able to defend himself if attacked. But he’d spent last night crammed in the furthest corner of the tent shivering in his jacket, and he didn’t feel like repeating that. 

He decided to curl up between Lee and Andrew, since Jacob tended to kick and he still didn’t trust Paige not to kill him in his sleep. 

Then, just when he’d gotten comfortable, Jacob elbowed him in the stomach. 

“Ow,” he growled. 

“Sorry,” Jacob squeaked. 

“Shut up,” Paige groaned. “Damn it, I miss May. At least she was a quiet sleeping buddy.”

“All of you hush,” Andrew grunted. 

Jean stiffened as he felt an incredibly cold steel arm wrap around his waist. 

“Jesus, your arm is like ice,” he hissed. 

“Shut up, Orion.”

“Make me.”

That particular comment sent Paige and Jacob into a fit of laughter. 

“We only have one tent,” Lee muttered, clearly irritated. “May and Gill can’t make out here and neither can you two.”

There was a sharp yelp as Andrew elbowed him. 

_ “Ohmygodjustgothefucktosleep!”  _ Paige groaned. 

“I’m trying,” Jean huffed. 

  
Inwardly, he cringed. This was going to be  _ such _ a fun few weeks.


	32. Our Pasts and the Present

After an early breakfast the next morning, they headed for the ruins, strapping on gas masks to protect against the toxic fog that had rolled in. 

Well, not so toxic it would eat through cloth and skin, but bad enough that breathing it would significantly shorten your lifespan.

They’d divided into teams. Lee, Paige, and Jacob were currently pulling up as much salvageable wood and lightweight metal that they could carry in order to build the gondola. Jean was picking through an old building with Andrew’s help, searching for anything that could be used to build an airship engine. 

“Anything good?” Andrew’s voice came from above. 

“No,” Jean replied, sorting through the still-intact storage container. “All that’s in this one is a bunch of rotten food and… oh, gross, a dead rat. You?”

“You should look at it because I have no clue what it is.”

Jean hoisted himself through the hole in what was left of the floorboards. He hissed in pain as a splinter stabbed his flesh hand.

Then he ambled over to Andrew, who was picking through what must’ve been at one point the living room. 

The house was made of bricks, so it had outlasted many of the other buildings. In this room, there were the desecrated remains of an old sofa, and there was a skeleton sitting on it, shreds of what used to be clothes clinging to the weathered bones. 

Andrew was kneeling on the floor, wiping the frost off a… holy shit!

“It’s a TV,” Jean said. “And it looks like that’s a VHS player and a speaker system. You can watch movies on it.”

Andrew shrugged. 

Then he went back to the box he was looking through. 

Out of curiosity, Jean peered inside. 

He gasped. 

There were VHS tapes in there, dozens of them. Most looked damaged and mildewed, but a few of them looked like they were in working condition.

Suddenly very excited, Jean ran over to the TV system. To his surprise, it looked relatively fine, given that the brick building had protected it from the worst of the elements, and even better, this house had an ancient generator so it was still connected to power. 

“Wait here,” Jean said, and headed outside to the snow-encrusted generator. 

He quickly fixed it and turned it on, and it rattled to life. 

Grinning, he ran back inside. 

The TV turned on, displaying nothing but static, and it looked pretty good except for a few cracks in the screen. 

Andrew, however, was cowering behind the couch, pointing his gun at it, a very alarmed look on what Jean could see of his face around his mask. 

Jean burst out laughing. 

“Chill,” he said. “It’s totally safe.”

He grabbed a better-looking tape from the box and wiped away the dirt, and praying his luck would hold, popped it into the player. 

The screen glitched and staticked a bit, and then an old Looney Toons cartoon started playing.

“What the fuck?” Andrew blurted. 

“Pre-war TV,” Jean said. “Cartoons. Little kids used to watch these. I remember in my reality, my cousins, they loved this show. Except a huge monster that was created to destroy the world killed them. As well as my entire family. And thousands more.”

“Huh,” Andrew said. 

“Yeah, it was hard to take in as a sixteen-year-old,” Jean said. “How about you? You have any family?”

Andrew’s face was unreadable behind his gas mask. “Complicated story.”

“Elaborate?”

“Mom got really sick back when I was fifteen,” he said. “Radiation sickness. It gets pretty much everybody, eventually, if the various other things don’t get you first. My dad was trying to find a job but nobody would hire him. We didn’t have enough money, and we probably weren’t gonna make it through heavy winter if something didn’t change for the better. I started looking for jobs. I was desperate, I was scared for mom. So I went and made the worst mistake of my life.”

Jean raised his eyebrows. 

“Let me guess,” he said. “That mistake has something to do with your arm and PAMA.”

There was silence.

In the background, there was a muted bang as Bugs Bunny shoved his carrot down the barrel of Elmer’s shotgun to stop it from firing. 

“Yeah,” Andrew finally said. “I… I met this guy, who told me he worked for PAMA. He asked me to do a delivery for him. Offered me a shit ton of money for it. Now, even kids know that if you get involved with PAMA it’ll follow you around one way or another for the rest of your life, but I… I was desperate. I accepted the offer. And… he kidnapped me. Took me to a PAMA base. I got drugged. Then I woke up in the middle of them sawing my arm off, and then I blacked out from the pain.”

Jean shuddered, remembering how he’d lost his arm. The blade of the lightsaber swinging at him too fast to deflect, a horrible, searing pain in his arm, then numbness and awful throbbing. 

This obviously hadn’t been the case for Andrew. 

“Then I woke up on a gurney,” Andrew continued, his voice quiet and stressed as he spoke. “Those memories are blurry. I remember the injections because they had to get the needles into my bones and it was almost as painful as them cutting off my arm. When I first woke up on the gurney, there was this girl next to me. She was too deep in shock, I think, and so they… disposed of her.”

“Disposed?”

“I think you know what I mean,” Andrew sighed. “Later I got put in a room with two others. They both had leg amputations. Bria had both chopped off below the knee, and Jamie had one cut off at mid-thigh. They were both older than me. Jamie was nineteen, Bria was seventeen. They were… almost like older siblings. We tried to look after each other as best we could.”

He took a shaky breath. 

“Then the physical training. I think I mentioned that before. They made us run, they made us climb, they taught us how to fight. And then there were the enhancements. Basically, they sat a kid down in a chair, injected them with a random compound, and waited for them to start foaming at the mouth. At least one or two died there every day.”

“Jesus,” Jean muttered. “Unethical bastards, that’s what these people are sounding like.”

Andrew laughed weakly. “The enhancements weren’t the only thing killing us. On my first day of physical training, there was this boy. His arm, where they put his prosthetic on, the wounds got infected. He was just behind me. I was trying to climb over an obstacle. He was leaning against it, trying to catch his breath, and you could see the pus and blood oozing. Like, you could clearly tell he was in pain and needed treatment. But instead of helping him, they yelled at him to keep moving, and when he hesitated, they… they shot him. I… I watched it happen. He was… he was the first to die, in that stage. Five more kids didn’t go back to their rooms that day.”

He took another deep breath. 

“It ended after three months,” Andrew continued. “Bria had already lost it  and started killing people a while before. Ha, that was the same day they made me punch through concrete. But anyway, Jamie and I were the only surviving subjects. And then he died on the injection table, right next to me. I had to watch it happen. So I… I snapped. Broke out of my cuffs, escaped the facility and killed as many people as I could on the way out.”

“Huh,” Jean mused, tapping his finger on his shin. “Funny. Their creation turned on them; _totally_ unexpected. I wonder what they were planning to do with you.”

Andrew shrugged. “Probably kill me and then start all over with a fresh batch of kids, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Jean sighed. “From what you said, that sounds like them.”

“Oh,” Andrew suddenly said. “I almost forgot about my parents. Well, after I disappeared, my dad was so desperate he ventured out into the wastes. A huntsman who mentored Paige apparently found what was left of him, and it wasn’t pretty. As for mom, the people were so afraid of her sickness spreading that they burned the house to the ground with her in it.”

Jean shuddered. “Pleasant.”

“I’ve been running from PAMA ever since,” Andrew continued. “I got a taste of what it would be like to get caught again around New Year’s. Jacob and I got caught. The only reason we got out was because they didn’t realize which experiment I was and put me in leather cuffs instead of metal ones, although I could’ve probably ripped through those too if I tried.”

“What’s so special about Jacob?” Jean asked. “I mean, he has an almost perfect knowledge of pop culture I know and he’s really skinny compared to you guys, but I’m confused as to why. And he’s got a tattoo like yours. Did he…”

“He got mixed up with PAMA,” Andrew replied. “Except that was more than 300 years ago. We found him in an old vault, frozen in preservation fluid. He was only alive because PAMA enhanced his healing to the point where he can survive almost anything, is immune to any disease,  _ and _ we could theoretically make a radiation sickness vaccine from his blood if we study it long enough. Lee insisted on helping him, even though… well, to put it lightly, if somebody told me I could go back and keep Lee from slipping in that puddle and accidentally opening the pod, well, I’d have to think about it for a while.”

“Honestly, same,” Jean chuckled. “If I could go back in time and stop myself from meeting certain people, I would do it in a second.” 

An awkward beat of silence followed. 

“We should probably keep looking,” Andrew said.

———

“Okay. Deep inhale, focus on all the things you can hear, let it out slowly.”

Jean stood opposite to Andrew in the middle of an open plain, watching the young man furrowing his brow in concentration and clench his fists, eyes closed tight. 

They’d finished up scavenging for today, and had decided to kill some time before dinner with training, and thankfully, the fog had cleared up, so Jean was currently trying to teach Andrew how to summon and control the power of the blue lion, or Blue, as Aidan had nicknamed her.

“I’m not getting anything,” Andrew said, eyes still closed. “Wait, wait! I think—“

Sparks crackled in the air and Andrew’s eyes flew open, glowing blue, and he yelped and jolted back. 

“What the…” he gasped.

Jean grinned. “Hold onto it,” he said. “Can you hear her talking to you?”

Andrew cocked his head to one side. 

“Is that what the growling is?”

“Yeah,” Jean confirmed, concentrating on his link to the red lion. He had a feeling summoning her would take more strength than usual, given that he hadn’t attempted connecting with her since the war. 

He bit his lip, closing his eyes. 

_ C’mon, girl, talk to me…  _

Then he felt that buzzing in his ears, and when he opened his eyes, red light sparked and popped off his fingers. 

He heard Andrew gasp. 

“Jean, you’re…”

“I know,” Jean said. “Now let the connection go.”

Andrew frowned and released his fists. 

The blue light faded and his irises faded back to green. 

“Good,” Jean said, releasing his own connection. Then he drew his sword and rushed Andrew head-on without any warning. 

Andrew shrieked and toppled back in alarm. There was a loud clang as diamond smashed against steel. 

“You need to learn,” Jean grunted, swinging at Andrew’s head. “How to summon her in the heat of battle! Make the connection!”

Andrew caught his blade and disarmed him, looking very frightened. 

Jean rolled his eyes in frustration and punched him in the gut, knocking Andrew back. He quickly dodged Andrew’s fists and kicked him hard in the back of the knee. 

He crumpled.

“Aaah!” Andrew yelped. “Gimme a second! I can’t do it if you’re—“

“Your enemy isn’t gonna wait!” Jean snapped, wrestling Andrew’s metal arm out of the way and pinning it. “Make it! Call her to you! Your life's on the line!”

Andrew squeaked in pain and tried to plant a foot in his gut. 

Jean heaved a sigh and stepped back, letting him get back to his feet and brush himself off. 

“Let’s try summoning our lions together again,” he grumbled. 

They ended up repeating the process several times, and each time Jean lunged at Andrew, he didn’t manage to successfully summon Blue’s power and use it once. 

“Don’t worry, the only reason I caught on so quickly was because I was in a war zone and under incredible stress the entire time,” Jean sighed, removing his knee from Andrew’s spine. “Let’s go eat dinner and try this again tomorrow.”

———

Days passed, and then weeks.

Sure, it was proving to be a pain in the ass, finding enough stuff to build the thing while also getting enough food, but they were pulling through and the airship was practically finished. They’d even managed to steal fuel for the engines, too, and Jean had rigged up a device that would (hopefully) create a portal big enough for the airship. 

Andrew had made progress, too. He’d managed to summon Blue’s power a few times, and he could sustain the connection for up to a few minutes now. 

Three days ago, Lee had left to get May and Gill, and just today a carrier bird had arrived with a letter from him.

“Oh, good,” Paige said. “Lee says he made it to Ground Town. Gill’s recovering nicely, and May apparently is still pissed about the whole getting-attacked-and-almost-dying thing.”

“Ha, I guess she’s doing okay, then,” Jean teased, pouring another shot of tequila into his coffee.

Currently, the two of them were waiting at a small café for an order of ammunition they’d put in yesterday. 

Paige set down the letter and snatched his coffee, taking a swig. 

“Hey!” Jean yelped. 

“Thanks,” Paige said, smirking. “Anyway, I’ve been meaning to ask. Are you and Andrew a thing?”

“What?” Jean spluttered. 

To be honest, he hadn’t given his feelings much thought after the incident involving the enderman, what… a month ago? Jean had been pretty tired lately, because building the airship and scavenging in the ruins had taken up most of his time and energy.

In general, any romantic or sexual thoughts regarding Andrew had been either strictly ignored or only explored late at night when he was alone in the inn where they’d rented out rooms once they’d gotten enough money.

However, Paige’s question made him freeze.

Mostly because even after more than a month he was still thinking about that kiss.

Even though they’d both been drunk.

But he knew he definitely wouldn’t mind kissing Andrew again. 

“Uh, you okay?” Paige asked, breaking his silence. “You’re staring off into space. Lee does that sometimes and usually it’s when he’s stressed or distracted.”

Jean felt his cheeks heating up.

“I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “About me and Andrew, I mean. I just, I haven’t felt like I do about him in so long and the other times I fell in love went badly for all parties involved and I have no idea how to approach this because we technically confessed to each other a month ago but the only reason was because we were pissed at each other and I have no idea whether it was just a heat of the moment thing or if—”

Paige laughed and held up her hands. 

“Slow down,” she said. “You’re talking so fast I didn’t catch most of it. But I got the general idea. You’re afraid to have feelings again.”

Jean scowled.

Paige raised her eyebrows.

“Okay, fine!” he snapped. “Yeah, I’m really nervous about… trying again. I mean, the last two people, they both died. And it was kinda my fault both times. I… I miss them.”

“Tell me about them.”

Jean took a deep breath.

“Okay,” he began. “The first… the first person I dated who I really felt… uh… forever about… wait does that make sense? You know what, never mind. Her name was Hollyleaf. She was taller than Lee, she had this little scar at the corner of her mouth, and she had the silkiest black hair ever, and the prettiest eyes. Also, she could kick my ass in physical combat, at the time, which is kind of a turn-on of mine.”

Paige snorted in amusement. 

“Anyway,” Jean continued. “She and her two brothers saved my life. I crashed a ship on their planet, and they ignored direct orders from their… uh… their government, I guess, to leave the crash alone. I woke up, and her people didn’t want me there at first because I was a human and her species is notorious for having very xenophobic societies, but… eventually I managed to prove myself to them. And me and her, over the course of the two years I was there, we fell in love. Then, when I rejoined my other friends, she came with me. She persuaded her people to join the war effort. And I had… very deep feelings for her. She changed me. I wanted to marry her. But the day I was gonna propose there was this attack, and she…”

Jean sucked in another breath, forcing back tears. It was painful enough to talk about her, and even worse to talk about where she’d met her end.

“She went down fighting,” he continued. “She saved my friend’s life. She took a shot for him, and… and… she bled out. In front of me. And then, I… I was… I was so angry, I was so sad, I went beserker on the guy who killed her. But I didn’t snap out of it like I did when I attacked Andrew. I was under the effects of mind control. For six months.”

“That explains a lot,” Paige mused. “The other person?”

Jean sighed. 

“It was different with my Aidan,” he said. “We weren’t together for very long. I guess we were… I guess we had chemistry, because I fell in love with him quickly. And… by the end of the two weeks we were together, I felt forever about him. But then he sacrificed himself to save existence, which almost got completely destroyed a while ago.”

Paige sat back. “Destroyed?”

Jean nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “If you think back a few years or so, do you remember anything weird or out of place happening? Like, for example, you walked into a room and you suddenly blink and you’re in a different room with no memory of getting there?”

Paige frowned, probably deep in thought. 

“Well, a few years ago I was skinning this rabbit,” she said. “One minute I was cutting the entrails out and then I blinked and the rabbit was suddenly back in one piece, fur and everything, no bloodstains in the snow. Then I started skinning it again, and I was even more confused when I kinda blanked out for a second and I was halfway back to my tent, holding a perfectly butchered rabbit carcass.”

“Sounds about right,” Jean said. “Well, those little things happened because this crazy lady named Mapleshade went and tried to destroy existence as we know it because she was mad at me. Aidan managed to use magic he was born with to scatter her essence to the darkest corners of existence. But… but he didn’t survive it. His body disintegrated, his soul or essence or something dissolved into the fabric of space and time and mended the damage Mapleshade had caused. And… even though it’s technically indirect, it’s my fault.”

“Bullshit,” Paige remarked. “He did it himself. He could’ve  _ not  _ saved existence, and he doesn’t sound as amoral as most of the people I’ve met. He saw choice and made the one that benefited the most people.”

Jean heaved a sigh. She had a point. 

It was strangely comforting how blunt and Phoebe-like Paige was. 

“Never thought of it that way,” he muttered, taking a long sip from his cup.

Just then, Jacob sprinted up to them, wild-eyed and frightened, his coat trailing behind him. 

“Somebody ratted us out!” He panted. 

“What?”

“They’re coming!” Jacob wheezed. “The townsfolk are trying to slow them down, but they won’t last long! Where’s Andrew?”

“Jacob, calm down,” Paige said. 

“Andrew’s in the knife shop getting his sharpened,” Jean said, reaching for his gun. He had a feeling something was up. 

“Who’s here?” Paige asked. 

“PAMA!” Jacob fretted. “We have to get out of here! Now!”


	33. A Young Warrior

They didn’t stand a chance against the boarding party. 

Phoebe tried to fight off the armed guards that handcuffed her, and they just stunned her with what looked like an electric riot control baton. 

Jesse didn’t like the look of that thing. 

He reluctantly held up his hands in defeat. 

Leo, however, looked more than pleased as the skinny guy no older than sixteen with stringy brown hair cut away the ropes they’d used trying to tie him up. 

“Thank you, Sparrowfeather,” he said. 

The young man just scoffed and rolled his eyes. 

“C’mon,” Leo huffed, shoving Red roughly forwards. “Off the ship.”

———

They were in space. 

Jesse stared in a sort of terrified fascination at the starry void outside as his guard led him down the hallway.  It was  _ huge,  _ and the Earth floating in the void below him looked so  _ small _ compared to everything, and as Jesse stared at the planet he felt about as significant as a piece of dandruff on a strand of hair on the underarm of a flea. 

Space was the night sky the way a nuclear explosion was a mushroom. 

“First time off-world, huh?”

It was the stringy-haired guy from earlier; Sparrowfeather. He looked vaguely annoyed, but not angry. More curious. 

“Yeah,” Jesse admitted warily. 

“It’s always scary the first time,” Sparrowfeather remarked. “You’re handling it well. I almost made dirt in my trousers when I left my planet.”

Jesse frowned. He recognized Sparrowfeather’s speech pattern. 

“You’re a Felus, aren’t you?”

Sparrowfeather nodded. “You know of us? I’ve never met a Twoleg who did.”

“Well, I met one,” Jesse admitted. “He’s from another reality. His name was Hawkfrost, and—“

“Ugh,  _ Hawkfrost,”  _ Sparrowfeather scoffed. “Top dog in the Dark Forest, isn’t he? He bullied me there, him and his father’s cronies. I haven’t missed  _ him, _ in the time I’ve been away from ShadowClan and Mum. StarClan, I miss Mum. I will admit, I hate it here. Arai’s a tyrant, Leo’s… unstable, at best. Our rations are disgusting, too, and—oh, no, I’m oversharing. Don’t tell Leo.”

Jesse winced. “How old are you?” He asked, shifting his cuffs. 

“Only sixteen leaf-cycles,” he said, coming to a halt at the door to a prison cell. “That’s years, in your terms. Now get in your cell. Your next meal is at twenty hundred hours.”

Jesse slowly walked into the cell, and Sparrowfeather left, muttering to himself. 

Jesse glanced around his cell. 

It wasn’t very big, just two bunks on either wall, a toilet surrounded by frosted glass, a sink, and a table with three chairs. 

Jesse heaved a sigh and sat down heavily on a cot. 

Stupid quest. 

Stupid decisions. 

He felt bad for Sparrowfeather, though. The kid clearly didn’t like it here, and he was only sixteen. Not even legal age yet, and he was probably being taught how to fight and kill here. 

Then the door to the cell hissed open again suddenly, and Jesse jumped. 

Two guards shoved a man in.

He was so battered and wounded that Jesse didn’t recognize him until he slowly sat up, groaning.

But it was unmistakably him. 

“Ow,” he muttered. “Ow, ow, ow. Gah, my knees.”

Jesse blinked, staring at his new cell mate in shock. 

_ “Luke?” _


	34. The Way Out

Jesse couldn’t find words. 

Luke just shot him a bitter glare as he hauled himself to his feet, limped over to a cot, and flopped down on it. 

The guy looked almost exactly like the movie character—blond hair, blue-grey eyes, short but strong build, a right hand made of metal. But there were little details that seemed… off. 

First of all, there was a big strip of burn tissue on Luke’s cheek, obviously a sword blow. His eyes were a little too bright, less grey than in the movies, and his hair was lighter, too. His jawline was sharper and his nose was crooked, and there was a cold, calculating gleam in his eyes that made Jesse want to cower. 

“They move me around,” Luke muttered hoarsely. “They want to keep me on edge. They get a better charge when my adrenaline’s going.”

Jesse stammered wordlessly for a few seconds before finding his voice. 

“You’re… you’re younger.”

Luke made a painful wheezing noise that might’ve been a laugh. 

“‘Course I am. Time is fucky.”

He rolled over, and Jesse gasped. 

The back of his dirty white T-shirt was badly torn. Bloody stab wounds covered his shoulder blades. They looked almost like oversized injection sites. 

“Jesus, what happened to you?” Jesse wondered aloud. 

“I know Pe—Red told you about how I’m a human power core,” Luke mumbled through his pillow. “They’re using me like a battery, and at this rate it’s probably gonna kill me. Thanks for getting my message to her. Even if it was pointless.”

“What, no, it’s not pointless!” Jesse protested, stifling the anxiety bubbling up. “Red’s here! We can get out!”

Luke scoffed. “Good luck.”

As if on cue, the door opened and the guards shoved a furious Red and an equally furious Phoebe into the cell. 

“Damn it!” Phoebe shouted. “I was almost out of my cuffs!”

Then Jesse realized it was  _ Petra,  _ who immediately started trying to pull a little silver disc off her metal arm, which was dangling uselessly at her side. 

“Oh, thank god,” Jesse exclaimed, letting out a sigh of relief. At least Phoebe and Petra were okay, but the fact that Beau wasn’t there made him nervous. Even if they  _ were _ a war criminal. 

Petra grinned. “Jesse!” She exclaimed happily. “I’m so glad you’re okay!”

Then she made eye contact with Luke. 

Luke froze. 

“Luke!”

Petra was suddenly hugging him. 

Luke scowled. 

“Watch my back,” he muttered. “Hurts.”

Jesse glanced nervously at Phoebe, who was rubbing a wound in her arm. 

“You okay?” He asked. 

“Yeah,” she said. “Just a little banged up, that’s all.”

“Luke, can you heal her?” Jesse decided to ask. “Red mentioned you having healing powers.”

Luke grimaced and shook his head. “Not in this state. I’m so drained I can hardly heal myself, much less other people. If they try to drain me again tomorrow…”

He fell silent. 

“Have you tried using the empathy link with your sister you told me about?” Petra asked. “If you could get a message to her, maybe—“

“I’m too weak. On Cloud City she was only a few miles away. I definitely can’t contact her from across the galaxy.”

Jesse glanced over at the cell door. To his surprise, it wasn’t metal. It was plastic, he realized. He gave it a sharp kick, but it held. 

Then he saw the tiny light from the corner of his eye. 

“Hey Petra?” He asked. “You were affiliated with Arai at one point. Do you know what ship we’re on?”

“We’re on the  _ Avenger,”  _ Petra replied. “A flagship that was repurposed from the wreckage very old, pre-Republic interplanetary vessel. It’s got a very intelligent magical consciousness, and will create exits and pathways and change its form at will, if you think hard enough. That’s why Arai tortures her prisoners so much. It’s to damage their willpower and keep the magic from responding to them.”

Jesse gave the cot he’d sat on a nudge. 

It slid to the side, revealing a metal plate on the floor with four bolts. The seams were glowing, which must’ve been the source of the flash. But the weirdest thing was the square, cat head-shaped symbol in the center with a star on it.

Luke hummed thoughtfully. “I thought the architecture looked ancient Feli-style.”

“Sorry, what is that?” Jesse asked. He had a feeling he was the only one who didn’t know what the symbol meant. 

“A StarClan crest,” Phoebe said. “The symbol of a particular Feli culture’s honored dead.”

Jesse shrugged. 

Glowing writing started to appear on it. 

“And that’s… no, that isn’t Feli runes,” Luke said. “That’s Old Puma. An ancient dialect of their language. It says it’s a door of memory. We can open it, but there’s three steps. First, we have to think of something always want to remember. Then we need to think of something we want to forget. Third, we need to think of something we badly want to remember, but we’ve forgotten. We each have to do that to open it.”

Awkward silence. 

Luke cleared his throat. “I’ll go first,” he said. “I always want to remember my family. I want to forget my father’s past, but I wish I could remember my mother.”

One of the four bolts on the door unlatched. 

“I always want to remember Alex and Oona and Aidan,” Phoebe said, her voice wobbling. “I… want to forget the times Jean tried to kill himself, and I wish I could remember how to make my grandma’s guacamole.”

Jesse faltered. Jean had tried to  _ kill himself?  _ And multiple times? That just added to how unstable and erratic Jean appeared to be. 

He gulped.

Now he needed to think of memories. 

Something he wanted to always remember? That one was easy, when he thought back to everything he’d seen in the past few days. 

“I never want to forget the feeling of happiness,” he began. 

Something he wanted to forget?

Also easy. 

“I really want to forget Reuben dying,” he continued, staring at the door. 

And finally, something he’d long forgotten that he desperately wanted to remember. 

That one was harder. 

He had disjointed thought of how easy that last one would be for Lukas, who’d lost his memory a few days ago. 

Jesse racked his brain, trying to think of something.

Then he found it. 

“I wish I could remember what my cousins looked like,” he mumbled. “I can’t remember their faces. The Storm killed them and the rest of my family, and… and it destroyed all the pictures…”

He caught himself, forcing back tears. 

He hadn’t thought about little Lila and Eric in so long, and the memories were so painful. He’d promised them he’d bring them both a bunch of candy at Christmas that year… 

“You lost family,” Luke mused. “So have I. Your latch opened. Petra?”

Petra’s expression darkened. 

“I never want to forget my Lukas, I desperately want to forget what I did under Arai, and I wish I could still remember what my dad’s hugs felt like,” she snapped, her face twitching. “There, are you happy, stupid door?”

The last latch opened. 

Jesse quickly pried open the door.

He couldn’t help but wonder why Petra had flinched like that. 

“What did they do with Beau?” He asked, peering into the dark matinence tunnel. 

“Brought them to the interrogation rooms,” Phoebe said. “Red, too. Except they brought her to this area with a weird symbol on the door. I think it was a tiger.”

“Before you ask, I know where that is,” Luke grumbled. “I know where everything is here by now.” 

He got up, climbed into the tunnel, and crawled away. 

After everyone else had crawled through, Jesse paused and laid his hand on the metal. 

“Uh hey, magic spaceship,” he said, tapping his fingers. “Look, I feel kinda stupid, ya’know, talking to a wall, but… thanks for letting us out, I guess.”

Then he dropped into the maintenance tunnel and crawled off into darkness.


	35. The Way Back

“You remember how the damn thing works, right?” Jean yelled, giving the left engine a sharp kick. 

It wheezed and coughed to life, and a roar filled the gondola of their airship, which they’d christened  _ the 1986 Winnebago. _

“Yeah!” Paige yelled. “I’m green to go!”

Jean winced as something rattled in the cabin. 

With the new development of PAMA being on to them, they needed to get to Ground Town, and fast. 

He screwed in the last bolt on the portal device. 

“Shit!” Jacob suddenly shouted from his lookout point at the door. 

Jean made the mistake of looking out the porthole. 

Several armored trucks had made it to the building sight, chasing—oh, god—Andrew, who was running beat-hell up the hill, a wild look in his eyes as he occasionally fired his gun at the approaching trucks. 

Jean swore. 

They weren’t quite ready. 

“I’m gonna cover us!” He yelled. “Paige, get this thing moving! Jacob, remember, if the engine starts to get too warm, press this button!”

He hopped out into the snow and almost crashed into Andrew. 

“What’s going on?” Andrew yelled. 

“The engine’s not up to speed,” Jean explained hurriedly. “We need to cover the escape.”

Andrew nodded. 

They both pulled out their guns and started firing at the approaching trucks. 

Then, just as Jean had dropped down behind a sheet of scrap metal to reload, there was a tremendous roar, and the  _ Winnebago  _ started to lift off the ground, the huge fans aided by the helium-filled envelope (they’d stolen the helium canisters from PAMA supply trucks en route to the bases). 

“C’mon!” Andrew yelled, breaking into a sprint and heading for the airship. 

Jean grinned and finished reloading. Then he popped up and fired a few shots at the men in the trucks before running after Andrew. 

The airship was rising quickly. 

Jean winced. It was off the ground. He’d have to jump. With a running leap, he hurled himself into the air, and grabbed the rail on the door. 

Then the unthinkable happened. 

His hand slipped. 

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. 

He began to fall. 

Screaming and gunfire. 

His heartbeat pounding violently. 

Numb terror. 

But then Andrew grabbed his hand and hauled him into the airship. 

They collapsed in a heap on the floor as their airship sped off towards Ground Town, Paige whooping over the roar of the engines as they shot past the treetops and away from the chaos. 

Jean realized he was on top of Andrew again, who was still gripping his hand, trying to catch his breath. 

There was a brief calm as their eyes met for a few moments too long. 

“Oh my god, Jean, you’re okay!” Jacob yelled, breaking the tension. “I saw you slip and I thought you were a goner!”

“Yeah,” Jean laughed breathlessly, slowly sitting up. “So did—“

Andrew suddenly sat up, grabbed his face, and effectively cut off the rest of his words with a kiss. 

Jean went still, slowly reaching up to touch Andrew’s face, closing his eyes and breathing in the smell of sweat and cigarette smoke and coffee lingering on Andrew’s skin. 

He realized he wanted this. 

Andrew finally pulled away, his green eyes bright and glowing with happiness. 

“Holy shit,” he breathed. 

Jean suddenly laughed. 

“I… I think that was long overdue,” he said, grinning and squeezing Andrew’s hand. “We need to do that more often.”

Jacob cleared his throat.

They looked up at him. 

“You do realize we’re in a war zone, right?” The brunet huffed, arms folded across his chest in irritation. 

“What’d they do?” Paige yelled. 

Andrew shot Jacob a warning look, but he just ignored him. 

“I think they’re a thing now!” Jacob yelled. “Andrew just pulled an absolute baller move and dramatically kissed Jean after a suspenseful escape!”

Jean rolled his eyes. 

Paige cackled.   


  
  
“HA!” She shouted. “Lee, you owe me fifty credits, bastard!”

———

They made what was ordinarily a two day journey on foot back to Ground Town in only about ten minutes. 

They set down outside the gate, scaring several caravans parked outside. 

Then, the gates opened and Isa sprinted out, a shocked look on her face, tailed by Lee, Gill, and May.

“Holy shit!” Isa shouted over the roaring engines. “You kids actually did it!”

Andrew, who’d just taken a sip from his canteen, choked. 

“You okay?” Jean asked. 

“Peachy,” Andrew coughed. “I’ve never heard Isa cuss before.”

“We had packs ready to go,” Lee said hurriedly, running up and hauling a backpack. “We got wind of PAMA being on the move and heading to Novac. We were planning to leave today, but I guess you’re here to pick us up.”

“Gill!” Andrew cried, hurling himself at the taller man who had his arm in a sling and stitches everywhere and a wad of cotton under the eyepatch over his left eye.

“Andrew!” Gill exclaimed. “Shit, watch the arm. Dude! My depth perception isn’t as great as it was, but I lived!”

“Barely,” May muttered, hauling over some medical supplies. 

“Lee!” Jacob yelled and practically tackled the guy. 

Jean snorted. 

“Sorry to ruin the moment but we gotta move, you guys,” Paige said, sticking her head out the front window. 

They quickly loaded the airship and took off again.

Jean watched at Isa’s form, shrinking until she was a tiny speck, and then she disappeared behind the hills. 

He grinned. 

He was leaving. 

He turned and started giving orders. 

“Jacob,” he said. “You helped build the engines. Keep a close eye on them as we get up to speed. Gill, help him out if necessary. Lee, I want you watching our six. May, go up front and watch our nine. I’ll watch three. Andrew, you’re with me.”

“Uh, hate to be a killjoy, but speaking of our six, we’ve got three more airships behind us,” May said, pointing out the back. “And they all have machine guns on them.”

“Well, it’s a good thing we armored the envelope,” Lee said. “We’ve gotta take them down.”

“Hell yeah,” Andrew said, and then Jean heard the rattling of gunfire. 

“Okay, new plan!” Jean said, snatching up his rifle. “Jacob, Gill! Engine bay! Everyone else, defend the airship! No, not you Paige, you’re flying!”

Noise filled the gondola as everyone scrambled for guns. 

Jean turned to the tape deck and speakers that he’d installed and pulled out a cassette from his pocket.   


  
  
He popped it in. 

The opening notes of  _ Crazy Train  _ were suddenly blasting through the airship. 

“You ready?” Jean asked Andrew. 

Andrew’s lips twitched into a grin. “I was born ready, Orion.”

Jean laughed. “How about another kiss, for luck?” He asked. 

Andrew scoffed. “Of course.”

He kissed him. This time, it was light and brief and brimming with apprehension. 

“Don’t die on me,” Jean huffed.

Andrew laughed.

Then they leaned out the side and started firing. 

There were three airships. 

Three silvery envelopes painted with an oversized PAMA logo, and a machine gun rigged to either side of the gondola on each. 

Jean racked his brain, trying to remember the weak points that had been specified in the files.

Then he took aim with his blaster pistol and fired at the seam of the envelope. 

There was a sudden burst of flame as the helium inside ignited, and the airship on the left started to sink rapidly. 

Cheers went up from the  _ Winnebago. _

Then, Jean felt a sinking feeling as he saw more airships rising from the hills. 

They were over the cliffs now, soaring towards the rocky peaks. A crash from this height would undoubtedly be fatal. 

“There’s one underneath us!” Lee shouted. “They’re shooting—“

There was a deafening crack as a metal anchor smashed through the deck half a meter from Jean’s foot. 

“Grappling hooks,” Andrew finished. 

“Oh, this just got a hell of a lot more difficult,” Jean muttered. “I’m going down there. Jacob, stay with the engine. Gill, see what you can do about this grappling hook. Andrew, stay up here and cover me.”

Then he swung out the door and grabbed onto the cable with his metal hand, and kept his grip loose until he reached the platform it had been shot from. The gunmen who’d fired it abruptly froze, staring at him in surprise. 

Then, as they were drawing their guns, they both fell, blood spraying from bullet wounds in their necks. 

Andrew slid to a halt, holding his gun in his flesh hand. 

“I thought I told you to stay up there, Jean said, mentally calculating the distance to the underside of the airship closest to this one. 

“I’m watching your six,” Andrew said, and then fired his gun over Jean’s shoulder, killing another guard. 

Jean scoffed. “Cut the cable, you dumbass. I’ll be right back.”

Andrew rolled his eyes. 

He headed into the airship’s engine compartment and easily knocked out both fans. Then he quickly ran up onto the platform. 

With nothing to push it forward and the cable severed, the airship was rising helplessly, due to the helium. 

As it rose past another airship, Jean quickly fired at the weak point. Not only did it go up in flames, it also crashed headlong into two more, and all three airships went spiraling into the cliffs in a ball of flames. 

“HA!” Andrew yelled at the fiery wreckage, holding up both middle fingers. “Who’s the PAMA bitch now, huh?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jean said, laughing and grabbing Andrew’s arm as they started to rise pass the  _ Winnebago.  _

He was preparing to jump when something hit him. 

Pain exploded through his chest as the smell of burned flesh filled the air. He heard Andrew yell and drag him off the airship. 

And then they crashed onto the floorboards of the  _ Winnebago.  _

“What the…” Jean said, slowly taking his hand off the charred wound on the side of his chest, trying to resist the urge to sing along to the song currently playing  _ (Another One Bites The Dust). _ “How in the fuck did they get  _ blasters?” _

“Oh my god,” May suddenly said in the background. “Jean, what’s that?”

Jean hauled himself to his feet, ignoring his injury, and ran to the side. He gasped when he saw the cannons on the… oh god, hoverplanes that _definitely_ didn’t belong to PAMA. 

“Paige, go lower!” He shouted. “It confuses their tracking! Everybody, get ready to fight!”

“Got it!” Paige yelled, and the airship shot towards the peaks. 

There was the screech of a laser bolt. 

“What the hell are those?” Gill was shouting, and Andrew’s face was white with terror. 

Then the explosion knocked them all off their feet as the blast hit. 

_ “Jacob!” _

There was a charred hole in the side of the _ Winnebago.  _ Jacob was dangling from it, a panicked look on his face. 

“We need to get those cannons!” Jean yelled. 

He gritted his teeth. Every movement made it feel like someone was driving a hot knife into his chest. 

Ignoring the stabbing pain, he grabbed Jacob’s arm and hauled him up. 

Then a smaller grappling hook hit the remainders of the wall. Jean quickly cut it with his knife, but several more hit. The two planes were putting up a real fight. 

“Paige!” Jean yelled. “Gun it! Pedal to the metal!”

“I’m _trying!”_

Then Jean saw the drones, all carrying stun blasters, sliding down the cables. He managed to cut a few of them, but it was too late. 

They’d been boarded.

“Shit!” He heard Andrew shout. 

There were sounds of blows and more shouting, and the  _ Winnebago  _ shot into the sky, soaring above the mountains at a dramatic rate, and then—

“Jean Orion! I’ve been looking forward to this day!”

Jean froze. 

He knew that voice. 

He’d had nightmares about hearing it again. And apparently it was coming to life, he realized, turning to face the horribly scarred face of the enemy he’d thought he’d killed years ago. 

“Thistleclaw,” Jean spat, the name bitter on his tongue. “You’re not dead.”

“Of course I’m not,” the grey-and-white-haired man snarled, raising his axe. “Not all the risen were banished back to the Place of No Stars after the war. I was one of the few you failed to catch,  _ Twoleg.” _

Jean opened his mouth, ready with a sharp retort, but he didn’t have to. 

Andrew had already launched himself at Thistleclaw and punched him hard in the ribs, knocking the man back. 

But then Thistleclaw shapeshifted into his cat form midair. 

Jean was ready. He dove for the mangy grey and white tomcat clinging to Andrew’s shoulders, his gun raised.

He  _ wasn’t  _ ready for Thistleclaw to shapeshift back to human and kick him. 

Jean shrieked, falling back. 

And then  _ out of the Winnebago. _

He managed to grab onto the side of the lowest airship at the last second, gasping in pain at the shock. 

“Where do you think you’re going, mewling kit?” Thistleclaw snarled, leaning over the side, and jumping down after him. 

“How the hell did you find me?” 

Thistleclaw laughed. “A young woman by the name of Arai told me about how our reality is one of many,” he hissed. “I asked if she knew where to find you, and she promised me revenge if she could collect a few cons from this reality.”

Jean’s heart missed a beat. 

He was traveling with several cons. 

With a furious yell, he flung himself back up and kicked Thistleclaw hard in the face, knocking him back. 

There was a loud shriek from above, and Jean froze. 

_ Jacob? _

“Ha!”

Thistleclaw knocked him down and slammed his boot into Jean’s chest. 

Jean screamed as his ribs cracked. 

He kicked and struggled frantically, but the pain was too much and Thistleclaw was too strong. 

Thistleclaw lifted him off the top of the envelope by his throat, teeth bared, eyes glowing dark amber with a vicious intensity that rivaled a thousand suns. 

“I’ve waited three years for this,” he snarled. “But I won’t kill you just yet. You’re the cause of so much pain and so much suffering. You need to feel what you’ve done, Twoleg.”

He held out his arm, aiming the small but still high-power blaster on his gauntlet at the weak point in the  _ Winnebago’s  _ hull. 

“No!” Jean wheezed. 

“I can’t wait to see your little face when the last people you love go up in flames along with your hopes!” Thistleclaw cackled gleefully. “I’m going to count down!”

Jean would’ve gasped, if he could. 

“Three!”

_ “A—ahg—aah—a—h—n!” _ Jean shrieked, his panic rising. 

“Two!”

More screams and gunfire. 

“One!”

Just as he fired the shot, a giant winged blue lion swooped from the sky and locked its jaws around Thistleclaw’s throat, dragging him out of the sky, and he fell, plummeting into the cliffs and to his death, screaming the whole way.

Jean coughed when Thistleclaw released him, scrambling for his sword. 

Then he saw Andrew.

Lying in a heap on the top of the envelope, several meters away, moaning faintly in pain. 

“Andrew!” Jean gasped, limping to his side. “You did it!”

Then he saw the damage. 

Andrew had taken the blast to his shoulder. Not his flesh shoulder, the metal one. But where Andrew’s steel arm had once been, there was nothing but frayed and scorched wires and jagged edges of metal, all of it steaming and melted. 

“I… I can’t feel my arm,” Andrew muttered. “Is… is it…”

“Gone,” Jean said. “You blocked the shot, but it melted through the metal and I guess it ripped off from the impact.”

Andrew let out a low, agonized chuckle. 

“I always wanted the fuckin’ thing to be gone,” he mumbled, a dazed grin on his face. “Never thought it’d  _ really  _ happen.”

He groaned in pain, resting his head on Jean’s knee. 

The  _ Winnebago  _ had lost some altitude, and Gill was standing in what was left of the door, waving wildly. 

“Andrew, can you stand?” Jean asked. 

“I think…” he grunted, shakily rising to his knees. Jean helped him to his feet, but even so, he was leaning on him heavily, teeth gritted. 

Jean took a deep breath. 

“With me,” he murmured. 

Andrew met his eyes, nodding. 

They jumped. 

They hit the floorboards just as an anti-aircraft missile from one of the PAMA airships shot past. 

“Guys!” Gill yelled. “Thank god you two are okay—oh, Jesus Christ, Andrew, your arm! What the hell happened? The thing’s fuckin’ gone!”

“Saved your asses,” Andrew grunted. “I need to sit down.”

He slumped against the wall and slid to the floor. 

“Can I fly up now?” Paige yelled. 

“Yeah!” Jean replied. “Fly up! High as you can! Then kill the engines and open the envelope when I tell you to!”

“I’m sorry what now?”

“Just do it!” Jean shouted. “Gill, keep an eye on Andrew for a minute.”

He then ran up closer to the cockpit, where his hodgepodge device that hopefully wouldn’t kill them when he activated it happened to be. 

They were steadily going up now, and they were in the noxious clouds, chased by gunfire. 

Jean coughed, trying to block out the rotten eggs smell as he opened the box that the time dial was in, hooked up to dozens of wires, the piece of flint ready to strike it to create the portal at the press of a button. 

“C’mon, baby, don’t let me down,” he muttered.

Then they broke through the clouds. 

The afternoon sun glared through the windows and the hole, flooding the gondola with light. 

Over next to the wall, Jean saw Andrew and Gill, staring at the clouds in fascination as they shot upwards and into the smoggy greenish sky. 

“Paige, now!” Jean shouted.

There was a rattling screech as the fans halted, and the snap of fabric in the wind as the envelope opened. 

They began to fall. 

Jean frantically glanced at his speedometer. 

They were gaining speed. 

50 kilometers per hour. 

60.

80.

100.

They broke through the underside of the clouds, the mountains getting alarmingly large as they plummeted like a stone. 

155!

Jean slammed the button. 

  
Blue fire flared around the  _ Winnebago,  _ and then blackness opened up beneath them, and then the airship was engulfed by the bright white light between realities.


	36. An Evening at the Serrano-Kogane Farm

_SPLASH._

They hit water. 

Jean yelped as lakewater rushed into the gondola, and the terrifying realization that probably none of his new friends (aside from Jacob) knew how to swim struck him. 

“Shit!” Gill was yelling. “May!”

“I’m here!” She yelled back, dragging Lee behind her, who was unconscious and bleeding from a blaster wound in his left thigh. 

Jacob was already up to his knees and floundering through the water to grab his backpack. 

Paige exploded out of the cockpit with a frenzied look on her face. 

Jean let out a sigh of relief and yanked his time dial out of the device, and stuffed it in his pocket. 

There was a nearby shriek of alarm. 

Andrew’s foot was caught in one of the holes on the floorboards. 

“Jean!” He yelled, struggling, panic in his voice. “My boot! Stuck! Laces!”

Jean groaned in frustration and grabbed his pack, then sloshed over to him and yanked his laces out. 

“C’mon!” Jean said. 

“Trying!” Andrew hissed. 

With a loud  _ crack,  _ the gondola broke in half and began to sink even faster. 

Gill, Jacob, and May had made it out with Lee, but Paige was struggling to climb over a fallen support beam, and Andrew was struggling to walk. 

“Paige!” Jean yelled. “Paige, knock out the window!”

She nodded grimly and turned, wading back into the cockpit. 

Andrew groaned. “Ow, ow, my shoulder!”

“C’mon,” Jean growled. 

He’d managed to half drag, half carry Andrew to the door when the crash of shattering glass filled the room and water began to rush in faster through the portholes, and the floor pitched violently to the side. 

Andrew yelped in pain and skidded away. 

Then, to Jean’s horror, he vanished below the surface. 

Without thinking, Jean dove. 

He instantly regretted it as the water pressure made his cracked ribs and blaster wound burn, but he swam down through the broken floor. 

He couldn’t see the lake bottom in the darkness, but he could see Andrew, frantically struggling to swim, but he was obviously losing the battle as his desperate thrashing got weaker. 

Jean gritted his teeth and swam down. 

He grabbed Andrew’s remaining arm and kicked hard, dragging him towards the surface. 

His head broke through. 

He coughed and gasped, hauling Andrew’s head up above the waves.

Then he swam towards the shore. 

The chill of the wind was numbing, he realized, dragging Andrew up the bank and dropped him, wheezing and gasping and spitting up blood. 

He barely heard the others yelling at him, asking if he was okay, asking about Andrew’s condition. 

Andrew!

“Shit!” Jean yelled, frantically shaking his shoulders. “Andrew! Andrew, wake up!”

No response. 

Andrew just lay still, soaking wet and silent and pale. 

Numb horror sank in. 

“No,” Jean spluttered, gabbing his wrist and searching desperately for a pulse. “No no no no no! Andrew! C’mon, wake up! You have to wake up! Andrew!”

A sob tightened in his chest. 

_ Not again. Oh god, please, not again.  _

“Is… is he…” Jacob whimpered. 

“Out of the way!” A woman’s voice suddenly came, and a dark-skinned woman with golden hair who seemed about Isa’s age ran up, accompanied by several young men and women holding fishing spears and RiverClan battle gear.

Then Jean recognized her. 

“M—Mothwing?” He choked out.

She ignored him and grabbed Andrew’s cold hand, frowning, and gave his chest a sharp pump downwards. Then she pinched his nose and blew a few hard breaths into Andrew’s mouth.

A few moments and repeats of the artificial respiration process later, Andrew jerked upright and coughed violently, spewing a lungful of water onto the grass.

He groaned. 

“Ow…”

“Oh my god!” Jean cried out in relief and flung his arms around him, and a collective cheer went up. “You’re alive!”

“Wait a moment,” Mothwing demanded, a scowl lining her round face. “Who are you? You’re not Jesse.”

“Yeah, I’m not,” Jean grumbled. “I’m Jean. You must be another version of Mothwing.”

Mothwing gave him a weird look. 

Then two more people jogged over the hill, two men carrying blasters. 

“Where’s the trouble?” The taller man with darker skin and a large patch of scar tissue under one eye shouted, and then his eyes widened when he saw Paige. “Hold on, what in the… Petra?”

“Wait, no, that can’t be Petra,” the man with long, raven-black hair retorted. “She’s got a real arm.”

Then Jean recognized them. 

“Lance?” He gasped. “Keith?”

———

Fifteen minutes later, they were at a small ranch on the opposite side of the lake, dried off and in fresh clothing.

Mothwing was still fussing over Lee in particular, trying to get him to eat some leaves, and Lee looked like he was about to throw up. 

“So you’re saying that in your timeline, I’m  _ dead?” _ Lance demanded, gesticulating wildly. “I’m sorry, this is really freakin’ weird! I mean, you even  _ act  _ like Jesse a little bit, but, like, you’re definitely a totally different guy! I just don’t get it!”

“Yeah, you’re definitely Lance,” Jean muttered, shivering and drawing his blanket tighter around his shoulders. 

Even inside the cabin, it was still cold, or maybe that was from almost drowning. 

“Anyway,” Jean continued, clearing his throat. “Have you guys heard anything from your version of… I don’t know what you call her here, but redhead? You said metal arm? Blue striped bandanna? No survival or self-preservation instincts?”

“Petra,” Keith grumbled. “Spacey. Kind of an idiot. She’s been going by her code name these days; Red. So far, she only lets Luke use her real name still.”

“Doesn’t  _ sound _ like me,” Paige remarked, gulping down more of the warm honey tea Lance had made. 

Jean sighed. “Shut up,” he huffed. “Can you call… um, Red? Or your Jesse?”

“That’s the thing,” Lance said, shaking some more cinnamon into a mug. “Our Jesse is on New Altea with his boyfriend helping Allura and Lotor with running the place. Hawkfrost isn’t gonna want to cooperate, and I doubt Jesse will—“

“I’m with  _ him?”  _ Jean blurted in surprise.

The idea of being in a relationship with  _ Hawkfrost,  _ an actual reformed cat demon who was passive-aggressive and annoying at best, made him shudder. 

Gill snorted. 

“Yeah,” Lance said nonchalantly, stirring some honey into the mug. “Jesse’s become a councilman there. Those two do a good job, but the last time they came to visit Hawkfrost got in the pantry and ate every single can of salmon we had.”

Jean stifled a laugh. Now that sounded like Hawkfrost. 

Keith cleared his throat. “As for Red, we haven’t heard from her since Breezepelt tipped her off about a known fugitive of ours resurfacing in Alaska. The team of SkyClan warriors who went with her came back saying they’d successfully captured Beau, along with two others, but then Red never showed up with them, although I have to admit I won’t be surprised if she got involved in more bullshit. She has the ‘too much’ gene and doesn’t know when to stop.”

“Who were the others?” Jean asked. 

He had a gut feeling that this would be very important. 

“A girl and a guy,” Lance explained. “The girl had red hair. Looked a lot like Red herself. The guy, well, a lot of them thought it was Jesse until they noticed his scar was missing.”

Jean slapped his hands down on the table. “It was Jesse!” He exclaimed, hope swelling in his chest. “And Phoebe! Ha, they’re okay!”

He got a lot of blank stares. 

“Friends of mine,” he added. 

This was big. Apparently he was in the same reality as Jesse, and as much as Phoebe annoyed him at times, he was glad to possibly see her again. 

“Uhm, hate to interrupt,” Andrew said quietly. “But my arm.”

“You want a new one?” Jacob remarked.

Jean hid a smirk as Andrew shot him an annoyed look. 

“Of course,” Andrew huffed. “I’m not gonna sit by while everything happens, and I’m not leaving Jean’s side.”

Keith and Lance exchanged glances. 

“We can take you to Terra,” Keith finally said. “The best engineer I know lives there. Her name’s Olivia, and she designed and built Red’s arm, as well as Lance’s legs, which he lost a few years ago in an incident involving lava, screaming, and lightsabers. You can borrow my ship.”

“I’m gonna go with them,” Lance said, squeezing Keith’s hand. “I need to stop by Beacontown anyway. I figure we should warn Radar, too. The kid’s got enough on his plate these days, and I think he’d appreciate having some help. Also, I thought we agreed on never bringing up Mustafar again, Mullet.”

Keith just rolled his eyes.   
  


Jean glanced at Andrew.

“You up for space travel?” He asked. 

Andrew made a face. 

“Do you think we can spend the night and leave tomorrow?” May asked. “We need to rest, and I think Gill has a cold.”

Gill scowled. “I do not, woman!” He grumbled, and promptly sneezed. 

May rolled her eyes and elbowed him in the gut. 

“We can leave tomorrow,” Lance said. “But we only have two spare rooms and the couch, so you’ll have to bunk together. Mothwing, would you like to stay over?”

The woman nodded. “Some coltsfoot should ease that cough, Gill, was it? I’ll be right back.”

She got up and left. 

“Well!” Lance concluded, rubbing his hands together enthusiastically and grinning. “Keith,  _ chico,  _ heat up the oven. We’re having garlic knots tonight!”

———

Jean stared at the ceiling. 

After exploring the backyard (Andrew and the others were fascinated by the plants blooming in the Archidaean spring), they’d eaten dinner and then retreated inside to rest. 

However, everyone else had crowded into one room, intent on gossiping. 

But not Jean and Andrew. 

They’d slipped away into the other spare room while the talking and laughter was in full swing. 

Jean vividly remembered Andrew asking if he could kiss him. 

One thing had led to another. 

Almost five months of unknowingly pent-up tension had finally released itself, all at once. 

Now Jean was wide awake, naked under the sheets, staring at the rafters in amazement. The shock of what they'd just done together was slowly sinking in. 

Andrew was curled up next to him, asleep, the shredded metal stump of what was left of his left arm covered in a protective medical cap Keith had fitted over it. His handsome face looked so tranquil and calm that it was hard to believe he had been made into a deadly weapon. 

The scars littering his pale, muscular body were like craters on the moon. 

Jean let out a quiet chuckle. 

Holy shit.

He’d never thought he’d ever fall in love again and yet here he was. 

With a sigh, he rolled over and rested his head on Andrew’s chest, letting his fingers tangle through his hair and listening to the steady  _ bup-bump, bup-bump, bup-bump  _ of his heartbeat. 

Andrew grunted in his sleep and wrapped his remaining arm around him.

Jean’s breath caught in his throat. 

“I love you,” he murmured. 

Andrew mumbled, shifting and hugging him close. “Love you too, sunshine.”

Jean smiled. He was sure he was having heart palpitations. 

He sighed. 

As he drifted off to sleep, a single thought settled in his mind.    
  


_ Aidan was right. Things  _ will _ get better. _


	37. Glimpses of Terror

The tunnel was so small that even Luke, who was by far the skinniest in the group, was having trouble. 

Jesse winced. The space was so tight it was a wonder Petra hadn’t gotten stuck yet, especially since she only had the use of one arm. 

He wondered if that  _ would  _ happen. 

“There should be a junction up ahead,” Luke hissed. “Then we can get out of this air vent. Petra, stop poking me.”

“You’re really effing slow,” she replied. 

Jesse managed not to laugh when he heard Luke’s exhausted sigh. 

He didn’t know what to make of this man. He’d had an idea of what Luke Skywalker would’ve been like: smart, kind, and a charismatic and powerful leader. The man crawling through the vent in front of him seemed to be the opposite: irritable, abrasive, blunt, and decidedly a smart-ass. 

“Jesse, I can practically hear you thinking about me,” Luke huffed. “Your thoughts are loud.”

Jesse froze. 

“You can read minds?” He yelped. 

Luke scoffed. “Yeah. I know exactly how you think a certain  _ someone  _ is incredibly attractive and you’d definitely—“

“Shut up,” Jesse quickly cut him off. 

He couldn’t afford for everyone to find out about how he felt about Lukas. 

Luckily, any further discussion of the topic was cut off as Luke stopped abruptly and punched the wall, popping a maintenance hatch open. 

Then he wriggled out. 

_ Jesse. _

Jesse hesitated at the exit of the vent. 

He could hear that strange growling again. Except it was much louder, and it felt like something was telling him to keep crawling down the vent instead of climbing out. 

Calling him. 

“We need to go,” Luke said impatiently. 

“You guys go ahead,” Jesse said. “I… I need to do something.”

Something in Luke’s eyes changed. 

Recognition, almost. 

“Then do it,” the man said curtly. “Meet us in the escape pod bay. We’re gonna try and find Red. Don’t get killed.”

Jesse took a deep breath and ducked back into the vent. He had a sinking feeling that the door that had appeared in their cell hadn’t opened  _ just  _ from sheer willpower. 

_ Jesse. _

There it was again!

He shuddered. The last time he’d heard creepy whispers like this, he’d ended up pissing off and subsequently beating a literal god in a fistfight.

But he followed it anyway. 

Personally, he wondered what Jean would have to say about this. Then again, he’d probably already be punching his way off the ship. 

Jesse chuckled grimly to himself. 

Then he rounded a corner and found himself in a large room. He stood, brushing the dust off himself. 

In the center of the room, there was a white stone dais surrounded by spikes of pale silver crystals embedded in the rock. On the dais, there was a simple crystal spire about the height of Jesse’s chest, glowing faintly as he approached it.

Now, he’d learned his lesson from the creepy underground cave where he’d gotten that stupid glove stuck on his hand, so he hung back and didn’t touch the spire. 

Then he couldn’t help but wonder aloud what the hell this place was. 

The silver glow flared. 

Jesse shrieked in surprise and flailed backwards, falling off the dais. 

_ “Welcome to the White Nexus,” _ a robotic voice echoed through the chamber.  _ “Welcome, Commander. What is your query?” _

Jesse tentatively reached out and nervously poked the spire. 

“Uh,” he squeaked, wondering whether or not to draw that pocket knife he’d managed to smuggle through the security check by hiding it in the lining of his boot. 

He cleared his throat. “What the hell is this place?”

_ “The White Nexus, which is the focal point for all White Commanders, in this reality. Any White Commander from any reality can come here, given that there is a Nexus for each Lion in every timeline.” _

“Okay,” Jesse mumbled, giving the white stone a half-hearted kick. “So this is… what is it, exactly?”

_ “A place of a high concentration of the magical energy your Lion rose from.” _

“Oh… uh… fuck, my brain is gonna explode,” he admitted. “So, like,  _ why _ am I here, though?”

_ “You need to be warned of the consequences.” _

“About what now?”

_ “This is a dangerous time for you, White Lion,”  _ the voice said.  _ “Your friends out in the main hull of the ship will suffer greatly, and some may not survive.” _

“Oh god,” Jesse blurted. “What in the—why’d you call me here? I have to help them!”

_ “Helping them will upset the balance of things,”  _ the voice continued.  _ “If you went with them, you could’ve done some good, but you would have forfeited the fate of the universe. For now, you need to stay at the Nexus and learn to control your power.” _

“Oh, bullshit!” Jesse yelled, forcing down the panic brimming inside him. 

_ “If you do not learn how to control your power, the lion will fall when the Phoenix rises, existence will end. Some sacrifices are necessary to preserve the universe.” _

Jesse grimaced. He’d dealt with computers before. 

“Show me,” he spat. “Show. Me. What fucking happens if I help my friends.”

_ “Do you insist, sir? The following simulations may be very disturbing, graphic, and could possibly even destroy your functionality.” _

“Show me!” Jesse hissed. 

_ “Yes, sir.” _

The room suddenly filled with white light, and Jesse yelped, shielding his eyes. 

Then it cleared. 

He was standing in the remains of Beacontown. 

The place looked like it had been bombed—the buildings were destroyed, streets were filled with debris, cries of pain rose from the rubble. 

Jesse suddenly felt like Jean’s metal fingers were clamping down around on his windpipe again. 

Then the vivid scene changed. 

He was in the ruins of a temple, positioned on the very top of a huge obsidian mountain. 

Thunder echoed around him. 

There was a blast of blue light and then horrible screaming, like someone was being tortured up on the hilltop. 

Jesse impulsively wrenched his knife out and ran up the steps, but then a blast of fire knocked him off his feet and he was lying in a snowdrift. About six meters away, Jean was slumped in the snow, moaning faintly in pain. There was a strange man with one arm was in the clearing, a frantic look on his battered face as he fought with a silver spear, trying to hold off a shadowy woman with a glowing scimitar. 

Then the scene changed again, and it was an empty, destroyed city. 

The sky above Jesse’s head was glowing bright purple and seemed to be fracturing. 

Even worse were the bodies. 

Red was lying on her side, eyes open and empty, blood still oozing from her mouth. Her hands were locked around the hilt of the blade embedded in her gut, as if she’d tried to pull it out as she’d died. 

Beau was frozen mid-scream, their blue hair matted with blood from the enormous gash in their throat. 

Jean was almost completely covered by a massive pile of rubble, his face almost unrecognizable from all the blood and dirt. Next to him was the man from earlier, who had a glowing black dagger sticking out of his throat. 

For some reason, Leo was there, sprawled on his back with a huge gash in his torso that led all the way from his collarbone to his thigh. 

And there was Lukas, too, slumped in the dirt with several arrows sticking out of him. 

Jesse numbly staggered back, his horror almost overflowing as he spotted the woman and the giant phoenix, her body glowing different shades of light. 

Then Jesse saw Luke, struggling to get up, bleeding badly. 

“Skywalker,” the woman spat. 

“This isn’t gonna go the way you think, Mapleshade,” Luke snarled hoarsely, spitting blood, eyes narrowed with pain and fear. “You fucked up something nobody can fix!”

The woman, obviously Mapleshade, just scoffed. 

“I’m willing to make sacrifices to get my revenge,” she growled. “Even if it means destroying everything. I want you to feel the pain I felt, I want you to be the one who creates my way home.”

She held out her hand. 

The glowing light coalesced into the shape of a gleaming scimitar roughly the length of her arm with a long, ornate obsidian hilt. 

Terror flashed in Luke’s eyes. 

He tried to crawl away, but it was much too late. Mapleshade stabbed him through the back with her blade. 

Luke screamed. 

His whole body began to glow. 

The screaming intensified, as well as the bright purple glow coming from his body and his wounds, and then—

BOOM.

A huge explosion blotted everything out. 

Jesse shrieked in shock and jerked upright, then collapsed on the dais. 

He was hyperventilating. 

“Oh my god,” he wheezed. 

They were all going to die. 

He had to warn them. He didn’t care if a computer was telling him not to. He whirled around and headed for the vent, trying to calm his terror. 

_ “Sir, where are you going?”  _ The computer demanded. 

“Away,” Jesse stammered, hands shaking as he yanked the grate back off the vent. “I don’t care. I have to—“

A steel cover slammed over the vent. 

_ “Sir, I cannot permit you to leave,”  _ the computer droned.  _ “My programming forbids—“ _

In a fit of panic, Jesse screamed. 

He felt the energy coming back, flooding through his body and exploding outwards, slamming into the spire. 

The computer said something, but it was drowned out. 

A new voice suddenly broke through. 

_ “Lion override initiated. What is your command, White Lion?” _


	38. Cold, Cold, Cold

Jesse nervously cleared his throat. 

The light hadn’t gone away. 

He shivered. Was is just his nerves, or had the temperature dropped?

He shivered, rubbing his biceps.

“I—I need to get out,” he stammered. “I need to find my friends.”

_ “Locating ‘friends,’”  _ said the new voice. 

Somehow, summoning the power of the White Lion must’ve manually overridden the automated system. 

_ “Friends have been located,”  _ the computer said.  _ “Now finding and clearing the quickest route to escape pod bay. Please stand by.” _

Jesse nervously sucked in a breath. 

This power he had, the destruction he was capable of, was starting to make him nervous. What would happen if he used it in battle? What would—

_ “Route has been calculated,” the computer said. “Proceed out the door to your left.” _

Jesse sighed in relief. 

“Thanks,” he said, and was about to walk out the door when there was a muffled yelp, followed by crashing, and then a grate in the ceiling popped open. 

And none other than  _ Beau _ fell out and landed on their back, a wild look on their bruised face. 

Jesse shrieked in surprise and reflexively lashed out. 

Beau toppled back, their hair singed. 

“Quiznak, what was  _ that _ for?” They snapped, scrambling back to their feet, the wild look replaced by annoyance. “You almost  _ killed  _ me, idiot!”

Jesse winced.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

Where in all  _ hell _ had this sudden paranoia come from?

He grimaced and rubbed his eyes. 

“Wow,” Beau remarked, jarring him back to reality. “What is this place? And you’re glowing. Do you normally glow?”

“What’re you doing here?” Jesse demanded, suddenly irritated. “Last time I saw you they were dragging you down a hallway marked  _ interrogation.  _ How in the fresh hell did you—“

“Oh, calm yourself,” Beau retorted. “I’m good at getting out of places.”

“Yeah, because you’re a fucking war criminal,” Jesse huffed, hopping down off the dais. 

“Well, I found what I need to fix my spear,” Beau offered. “I was crawling through the vents. The stuff was tragically easy to steal. Now, we need to find the others before—“

“How’d you get out?” Jesse blurted. 

There was something unsettling about how easily Beau had escaped. He didn’t know what it was, but he didn’t like it. 

Beau scoffed. 

“I used an Altean alchemy technique to slow my heart rate so that it looked like it had failed,” they said. “Then when they took me to the crematorium I slipped out of the pod and escaped. I’ve been crawling through the vents for a while now. Where have  _ you  _ been?”

Jesse hesitated.

But he relaxed a bit. That escape method sounded complicated, but also believable enough. 

“Well, we need to get going,” Beau huffed. “Escape?”

Jesse reluctantly headed out the door.

For some reason, he felt more on edge than he should have. It was like the power he was channeling, that he’d been so proud of at first, had started grating on his nerves and magnifying his anxiety. 

He didn’t like it at all. 

Because what if he lost control? What if started yelling at someone? God forbid his  _ powers _ get out of control. 

Jesse bit his lip, trying to stifle the irrational fear. 

No, he wouldn’t lose control. He was famous for being a skilled and talented hero who could keep cool under pressure.

This was just the circumstances, right?

Right?

He shuddered. 

Why was it so cold in here?

They turned a corner and came to a turbolift, which they boarded. 

Jesse hit the up button. 

_ “We’re sorry, you don’t have security clearance to this level,”  _ a computerized voice said. 

Jesse growled in frustration and clenched his fists. 

The lift creaked, groaned, and then Beau yelped in alarm as the lift shot up at an alarming speed. Jesse grabbed onto the rail for support, and when the lift stopped, he saw the metal walls were literally steaming. 

Beau was also gritting their teeth in pain, flexing their burned hands. 

“What was  _ that?” _ They demanded. 

Jesse scowled. “The lift wouldn’t take us up,” he grumbled. “So I made it.”

Beau just gave him a nervous yet appraising look, turned, and left the lift, muttering under their breath. 

Jesse followed them. 

He still felt strangely cold, even after heating up the lift that much. 

Then alarms started to blare. 

Jesse shrieked and reflexively lashed out, launching a column of white fire into the wall, and Beau stumbled back, arms flailing wildly. 

“What the hell’s your problem?” They snarled, yanking out their penknife. 

Jesse saw the blade flash and instinctively grabbed Beau’s arm and shoved them back. 

Only he hadn’t noticed the fire in his hands. 

Beau cried out in pain. 

Jesse realized what he’d done. 

“Oh my god!” He gasped. “Oh my god, Beau, I’m so sorry! Are you okay? Come on, please be okay!”

Beau groaned, clutching their chest. 

Jesse’s breath caught uselessly as he stared in abject horror at the still steaming hand-shaped burns on Beau’s chest and arm. 

Beau slowly looked up at him. 

“What the hell’s this power turning you into?” They hissed, whirling around and vanishing down the corridor. 

Jesse staggered after them, clutching his arms to his chest. 

He couldn’t stifle his fear now. 

Then he heard screams, and jumped back, a tingling sensation filling his body.

Around the corner was the pod bay, and there was Phoebe and Petra, dragging a battered Red between them, while Luke seemed to be holding a force field of purple light around them as they fought their way through the crowd of soldiers toward an escape pod. 

He was obviously in considerable pain, judging from his agonized expression and the blood leaking from his ears. 

Jesse acted before he thought. 

He launched himself down the corridor, letting his power explode outwards.   
  


_  
Don’t hurt Beau don’t hurt Beau_

The screams swelled in volume. 

And then they vanished. 

When the white-hot fire died, the metal walls had all fused from the heat and were dripping scalding drops of metal. 

The only remains of the enemy were a few charred skeletons. 

Then Luke spoke. 

“Jesse, how did you do that?”

Jesse felt a stab of irritation through his headache and his anxiety. 

“White lion,” he muttered. 

God, it was even colder here. 

“How strong was your bond?” Luke asked urgently. Despite the fact he was obviously in pain, the man looked awed and slightly afraid. 

It was the  _ afraid  _ part that was making Jesse very nervous.

“97 percent,” he mumbled. 

The fear in Luke’s eyes grew.

“Look what the idiot did to me!” Beau snapped, holding out their arms, revealing the burns again.

Jesse cringed as Phoebe’s eyes flashed with alarm, Petra grimaced, and Luke scowled.

“Jesse,” Luke said. “Has anyone tried to teach you how to control it?”

“I found out today,” Jesse sighed, recounting how he’d blasted all those tendrils away in Mount Feyran. “Red knows about it. She told me I had powers.”

Luke whipped around and glared at Red.

“Did you not fucking try to help him?” He snapped.

“What?” Red muttered hoarsely. “My bond is below fifty! I couldn’t possibly teach anybody to  _ control  _ it! I couldn’t summon her until the Great Battle!”

Jesse winced. Red looked bad. She was bleeding from her mouth, nose, and ears, and her eyes were sunken. Also, when she struggled to stand, Jesse saw wounds identical to Luke’s in her back.

And what was the Great Battle?

He had a feeling that if he knew he wouldn’t be pleased.

“Goddamn it!” Luke snarled, limping to an escape pod and punching something into a keypad. The door slid open. “Get in the pod. All of you. Jesse, you have the strongest, most powerful connection to your lion in recorded history. Do you know—no, of course you don’t know how dangerous that is for all of us. Please try to keep a grip until we’re on the planet.”

With that, Luke climbed into the pod.

Jesse followed him, the words still spinning in his ears.

_ Dangerous. _

_ Strongest. _

_ Most powerful. _

He wasn’t sure if he still liked his powers or not.

———

They landed in their pod on the roof of one of the few skyscrapers in Anchorage. 

“First things first, we need to get Red somewhere safe,” Luke was saying as he went to work tying a wire around his wrist. “Second, Jesse, I want you to grab this wire and surge.”

Jesse stared at the wire in confusion.

“Just do it.”

Jesse flinched and took the wire. He frowned, but relaxed a little bit. He’d discovered that he could alleviate his headache and chills, but only if he stayed tense.

Without warning, white light flared.

Luke was suddenly stumbling back, breathing hard, eyes literally glowing purple before they faded back to normal.

“Thanks,” he said briskly.

Then he hoisted Red up.

“You look like shit,” Red muttered.

“So I’ve heard,” Luke huffed.

Jesse watched the duo. They seemed to know each other well, judging by how they were insulting each other.

“Hey, are you okay?” Petra suddenly asked.

Jesse jumped.

“I’m fine,” he muttered, shivering. 

His chills were getting worse by the minute.

“Don’t burn me again, idiot,” Beau grumbled. “Hurts. Like a bitch.”

They headed down to the record shop.

That was a mistake.

The front window had been shattered, and there were soldiers everywhere. They were all men, as far as Jesse could tell, and they were wearing strange black armor and holding machine guns.

But that wasn’t the worst part. 

Several of them were holding onto a kennel, in which Jesse could see Junebug wearing a muzzle and struggling and meowing.

And Lukas was lying in the road, bleeding, and begging for his life.

_ Leo  _ was pointing a sword at him.

“For the last goddamn time,” Leo growled. “Where the hell is your Beacontown?”

“I told you, I don’t know what that is!” Lukas stammered. “Please! I have amnesia! I already told you! I don’t know—”

Leo kicked him sharply in the ribs.

Jesse panicked.

“Stay away from him!” He screamed, and lunged.


	39. You’re Like The Sun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just to be clear I’ve changed my username to match my Instagram but other than that nothing else is different

It was always pretty trippy, Jean thought to himself, watching the sun rise from the west instead of the east. He’d always—

“The sun’s fucked up. Is that normal?”

Jean jumped.

“Gah!” he yelped, almost backhanding Andrew in the face. “You know not to sneak up on me like that, damn it!”

Andrew just rolled his eyes.

“As I was saying,” he said. “The sun’s rising in the west. Is that normal?”

“Yeah,” Jean said, picking up the knife he’d dropped. “It’s always weird at first. The planet just rotates the opposite way as Earth, that’s why.”

A comfortable silence settled over the two of them as they watched the sun rising over the mountains. 

Jean glanced over at Andrew again. 

The man’s hands had always been constantly moving, may he be cleaning a knife, whittling, kneading them in his lap, or holding a cigarette on the rare occasion that he smoked (which usually was when he was stressed). 

Now, his metal arm was gone, ripped off by a blaster bolt, but his right hand was still tap, tap, tapping away on his knee, in a steady staccato rhythm. 

Finally, Andrew reached into his coat pocket and tried to pull out a cigarette.

Unfortunately, he was left handed and despite his enhanced reflexes and strength, he fumbled with the package and dropped it and his lighter. 

“Shit,” he muttered. 

Jean stopped and grabbed both off the ground, trying to hide his smile.

“Didn’t they train you to be ambidextrous?” He asked, handing Andrew a cigarette and then taking one for himself. Then he lit his, and leaned up to light Andrew’s.

Andrew blushed. “Thanks. And yes. But I got out of that habit.”

Jean took a drag on his cigarette and slipped an arm around Andrew, gazing up at the clouds that were bathed pink in the dawn light. 

He wondered if Aidan and Hollyleaf could see him now. 

If they could see him with someone new, who he would love and protect with everything he had to the end.

Slowly recovering. 

“Y’know,” Andrew finally said, breaking the peaceful calm. “I always thought I’d never feel happy after… what happened to me. But then I met you, and after we got through that rough bit… well, teenage me was wrong. I think I  _ am _ gonna get better. With you.”

Jean stared at him, feeling the warmth bubbling up in his chest.

“You’re like the sun,” Andrew continued, staring at the sunrise. “You’re hot-headed, uncooperative, and you can really do some damage, but you’re dependable and you’re always there to count on. You just… give off light and warmth, y’know? And you’re strong, too, and kept fighting through everything. I wish I was able to do that. I just kept running away, but you… you don’t really ever give up for real. And you… you’re… you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Jean. I… I love you.”

Jean hesitated. 

“Uhm,” he said awkwardly. “I’m not good with words, but… uh. You’re hot.”

He felt incredibly out of his element, mostly because he was really bad at feelings in general; much less eloquent at proclamations of love. 

Andrew let out a sigh of relief.

“Thank fuck,” he said, nervousness in his voice. “I had to ask Lee what to say, and I may or may not have rehearsed that several times. ”

Jean snorted. 

“I love you,” he chuckled, leaning up to kiss Andrew’s cheek. 

Except Andrew turned and met him halfway, gently kissing his lips. 

Jean paused, caught off-guard, but he leaned in and kissed him back. He felt himself smiling. He was in love, and he had hope again. 

This moment was perfect, and he never wanted it to end. 

Andrew made a soft noise in the back of his throat and let his mouth fall open, deepening the kiss. 

Jean sighed.

He reached up with the had that wasn’t occupied with his cigarette and gently ran his fingers through Andrew’s tangled hair, lightly kissing the corner of his mouth before leaning back in and—

“Hey! Idiots in love!” Paige shouted at them. “We’re gonna leave your asses behind if you don’t get on the ship!”

Jean awkwardly pulled away, feeling his cheeks flushing. 

“We’re never gonna hear the end of this,” Andrew grumbled, standing and holding out his hand.

Jean snorted, grabbing his hand and hoisting himself to his feet. 

“Well, as far as we know, they haven’t found out about last night,” he joked, extinguishing his cigarette in his metal palm and tossing the butt over his shoulder. “Which is shocking, considering how effing loud you were.”

Andrew’s cheeks flushed red with embarrassment. “Oh, fuck you.”

Jean just laughed and squeezed his hand, kissing him on the cheek. “Hey, I’m not judging. Now, babe, how do you feel about space travel?”

———

“Okay, raise your hand if you have  _ never _ been to space.”

Jean hid a smirk as every single person except for him and Lance (who’d asked the question in the first place) raised their hands.

“Now, Jean, you’re copiloting,” Lance continued, a devilish smirk on his face. “The rest of you are sitting in the lounge. If you get nauseous, there are puke bags for you to use. Do NOT puke on the floor, because I’m borrowing this ship from a friend and he’d probably punt me into the sun if I fucked up his upholstery. Now get on.”

An awkward pause. 

Then everyone filed onboard the  _ Millennium Falcon,  _ in various states of excitement and fear. 

Jean sat in the copilot’s seat, running his fingers over the worn leather. 

“Heh,” he said. “In my reality, this ship got blown up. Luke died on it, along with Han. I never really knew them personally, but Leia spoke highly.”

“How much stuff and people got wrecked in your reality, anyway?” Lance asked, priming the engines. 

Jean chuckled sadly, thinking of all the faces, all the names. 

“Well, the war was a lot more destructive back home,” he said. “More of a… what’s the word, a pyrrhic victory. Sure, we stopped the universe from being destroyed, but it’s been almost three years and Beacontown has only barely begun reparations. It’s that bad.”

“Oh,” Lance said quietly. “How did me and my friends... I mean, how did my old Voltron team die?”

Jean winced. “You sure you wanna hear?” He asked. 

Lance nodded, easing the ship into the sky and towards the horizon. 

Jean reached over and flipped a few switches, sighing. 

“Well,” he began. “You died first. You were trying to stop Shiro from leaving the Castle after he suddenly turned on everyone. He killed you and escaped with Lotor. Subsequently, Shiro died next because Leia had to kill him in self-defense. Keith died only a few weeks after, on Earth. Got shot down by Galran forces. Then Pidge—she went by Katie in my reality—she was killed when Leia accidentally blew up Puerto Rico.”

Lance laughed weakly. “Heh, Luke did that here. Wasn’t pretty.”

Jean winced. “Neither was it in my reality,” he sighed. “Anyway… Hunk’s mental health went downhill fast. The poor guy was all alone, and he started getting too reckless in battle. Finally he took one hit too many, and…”

Uneasy silence filled the cockpit as they exited the atmosphere. 

Lance finally spoke.

“Pidge died here, too. The same way.”

Jean winced. 

Then, the quiet was broken as the door hissed open and Andrew skidded you a halt, Jacob on his heels. 

The two of them craned their necks, staring at the stars in awe. 

“Woah!” Jacob exclaimed. “Holy shit!”

Jean glanced up at Andrew, who was staring at the planet below, entranced. 

“Wow,” he blurted. 

Jean couldn’t help but chuckle fondly and admire the starlight shining on Andrew’s face, reflecting off his skin. 

He looked beauti—

“Holy motherfucking ass!” Paige yelled, elbowing her way past him. “We’re in fucking  _ space,  _ May! Lee, look at the floating rocks!”

Jean snorted. 

“They’re called asteroids,” he said, watching Gill attempt to wriggle around everyone. “They make a big ring around the planet that the Clans call Silverpelt.”

“They’re blue, not silver,” Andrew remarked. 

“Yeah, but they look silver from the surface,” Lance replied, leaning over and smacking Jacob’s hands away from the controls. “Now, all of you go sit down. I’m sending the ship into hyperspace. Jean, wrangle your boyfriend, please.”

Andrew, who was trying to pry open the glove compartment, flushed red. 

Jean burst out laughing.

“What?” Andrew hissed. “We’ve never used the B-word before!”

“Well, do you want to use the B-word now?” Jean asked, pulling him out of the cockpit and ignoring Lance’s laughter.

Andrew’s blush deepened as he nodded. 

“Okay,” Jean said, shaking his hand as they entered the lounge. “You’re my B-word now, and I’m yours. There we go, babe.”

“Your what?” Gill asked mildly. “What kind of B-word?”

“His bitch, obviously,” May grumbled, smearing a new layer of greenish plant paste that Mothwing had packed for them on Lee’s wounds. 

Everyone else burst out laughing. 

Well, except for Andrew, who looked like he was trying to resist the urge to commit a quintuple homicide. 

“Hey, Andrew,” Lee said, smirking lazily at him. “Smitten much?”

Jean couldn’t place any meaning in the phrase, but the others obviously could, considering how anger flashed through Andrew’s eyes and everyone else burst out laughing.

“Why you—“ Andrew snarled, attempting to punch Lee.

“Chill, babe,” Jean said, holding him back by his remaining arm. “We’re officially boyfriends now.”

Then Lance came out of the cockpit, looking confused. “What in the hell did I just miss?”

More laughter. 

———

They came out of hyperspace too early, and to a planet that looked like a pure obsidian sphere surrounded in blue flames. 

“Uh, this is  _ not _ Terra,” Jean remarked. 

“You think?” Lance demanded, rolling his eyes. “Damn it, I could’ve sworn I put the coordinates in right.”

As if on cue, the engines rattled and the lights shut off. 

“Great,” Jean grumbled. 

Then one of the monitors started to beep. It was the gravity sensor, and it was going wild. 

“What just happened?” He asked. 

“Don’t know,” Lance mused. “I—“

The whole ship rattled alarmingly, and then Jean realized why the gravity sensor was freaking out. 

The planet was breaking apart, and situated right on the edge of… 

“It’s a black hole!” He yelled. 

“Oh,  _ mierda!”  _ Lance snarled. “Divert auxiliary power to the main thrusters! We can’t get sucked in or we’ll be ripped apart!”

“Got it,” Jean growled, frantically flipping switches. 

An alarm started to blare. 

Lance flipped it off. 

The whole ship groaned. 

Jean bit back a curse as an idea popped into his head. “Lance, I’m going to the engine room,” he said. “Punch it when I tell you to. If all else fails, aim for the planet.”

Before Lance could protest, he left the cockpit. 

Meanwhile, out in the lounge, everyone seemed to be borderline freaking out.

“Andrew, we’re going to the engine room,” he said, marching into the lounge, grabbing his arm, and dragging Andrew to the back of the ship. 

“Wha—“

“Just trust me,” Jean huffed, yanking the engine hatch open. 

Andrew stared in confusion. 

Jean quickly pulled out a handful of wiring connected to the fuel line and wrapped it around his metal hand. Then he grabbed Andrew’s arm. 

“What’re you—“

“Summon Blue,” Jean said. 

He had no guarantee that this plan would work, but he’d heard stories of Leia powering a starship with the Black Lion before. 

Hopefully two lions working together could defeat a black hole. 

Jean gritted his teeth.

“Make her power pulse outward on the count of three,” he said, squeezing Andrew’s hand.

“Jean, what’re we—“

“Just trust me!” Jean hissed. “One, two, three! Go, go, go!”

The engine room was suddenly filled with blinding red and blue light, and the  _ Falcon _ shot forward.

Jean staggered and fell, groaning. 

His arm hairs were steaming. 

“What the hell was that?” Andrew wheezed, heaving himself up. He looked started, and very worried. 

Jean winced. “We used our powers to restart the engine and hopefully give us enough of a boost to escape the massive gravitational pull from that black hole we found,” he explained. 

Suddenly, the intercom crackled. 

“Good news!” Lance shouted. “It worked, whatever you did! We’re out of the thing’s direct pull! Bad news, we’re gonna crash on the planet!”

Andrew’s eyes flashed with alarm. 

“Wha—“

“Oh, shit,” Jean blurted, struggling back to his feet and limping towards the cockpit. “Go to the lounge and tell everyone to strap in and get ready for a really rough landing!”


	40. Penumbra

Luckily, the crash wasn’t  _ too  _ terrible.

“We still have power,” Lance’s muffled voice came from the ceiling panel. “We lost our left landing strut and the radar and com systems, and our lateral engines are clogged. So we can’t take off yet.”

Jean swore. 

“We’re gonna have to go outside to fix those,” he grumbled. “Aren’t we?”

“Yeah.”

Jean let out a heavy sigh and turned to the atmospheric sensor. He really didn’t want to wear a space suit. They were bulky and uncomfortable and rather unflattering. 

Also, they were a real pain in the ass to put on and take off.

He sighed in relief when the readings came up.

“We lucked out,” he told Lance. “The atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide and oxygen, except there’s too much carbon dioxide and just enough xenon that it’ll kill you if you stay out in it for more than an hour without an oxygen mask or something.”

“Temperatures?”

“Cold,” Jean said. “Hovering around ten to fifteen degrees Celsius.”

Lance muttered something under his breath in Spanish, likely curse words given the context. 

“Get masks,” he said. “Take a few of the others and go out there and unclog the lateral engines. I’m gonna try and get the radar back up and contact Terra.”

Jean snorted. “Leaving the tough work for me, Serrano?”

A humored laugh. “Get off my friend’s ship, asshat.”

Jean chuckled and headed out.

“Are we okay?” Jacob immediately asked as he entered the lounge.

“For the time being,” Jean sighed. “I need a few of you to come outside and help me. Be warned, it’s cold out there.”

Discontented muttering. 

“I will,” May volunteered.

Gill started to get up, but she turned and glared at him. 

“No, you have a broken arm,” May huffed. “And you don’t heal as fast as Jacob or Andrew. Sit your ass down.”

Gill rolled his eyes and sat back down.

“I can help,” Jacob offered hopefully. 

“I will, too,” Lee said.

Jean sighed in relief. “‘Kay, three of you is enough,” he said. “We’ll be back in a little bit.”

———

Jean shivered, prying the strangely porous black rocks out of the engine. 

It was  _ freezing  _ out here. He didn’t like it at all, and all the noise from the roaring with and the thundering sounds of the black holes above them were really annoying. And it was a perpetual twilight here, which meant he had to hold a flashlight in one hand, further encumbering him. 

And there was the sleet that felt like needles stabbing Jean’s skin whenever he faced the wind.

There was a pained yelp, a loud thump, and muffled swearing. 

Jean quickly glanced over and saw May on the ground, clutching her bleeding palm. 

“Stupid metal!” She snarled. 

“Go inside!” Jean shouted over the roar of the wind. “You don’t wanna get sleet in that cut! Send Paige out!”

Five minutes later, not Paige but  _ Andrew  _ came marching out, his mask doing little to hide his stubborn expression.

Jean groaned.

“Go back inside!” He yelled. “You only have one arm!”

Jacob, who was dangling from the elevated part of the ship, raised his eyebrows in surprise. 

“There’s something weird about this place!” Andrew yelled over the wind. “I can’t explain it, but I need to go somewhere! It’s like… like something’s calling to me out there!”

With that, he whirled around and started climbing up the ridge, his lack of a left arm painfully obvious.

Jean hesitated. 

He didn’t like the sound of that.

He heaved a sigh.

“Jacob, radio Paige and tell her to come out here and help,” he grumbled. “I’m gonna go talk to Andrew. You and Lee keep working.”

He dropped down and sloshed through the mud after Andrew.

“Don’t try to stop me,” Andrew called as he started to catch up. “I’m going out there. I need to find it.”

“I’m not stopping you,” Jean huffed. “I’m making up for the arm you’re missing.”

And so they continued climbing up.

Finally they made it through a canyon and onto an open plain, where a strange obsidian mountain stood out maybe a mile away.

Jean squinted. There were steps carved into the side, leading up to the top, where what looked like a massive stone temple was, dark spires stretching into the dark bluish glowing sky, outlined by the black hole.

The name suddenly came to Jean without any explanation: _Blue Nexus._

It looked and felt sinister.

And of course, as if in a trance, Andrew resolutely marched toward it.

Then Jean froze.

There was a starship up there, and it looked like one of Lotor’s Sincline ships, except it was black and red instead of orange and blue.

“Andrew!” He called. “Wait!”

Andrew ignored him.

Jean grimaced. 

“Andrew, I said—“

Then he saw how Andrew’s eyes were black as pitch and his pupils were slitted and glowing orange, and how his face was slack and emotionless.

Overwhelming terror filled him.

“Andrew!” Jean yelled, grabbing his arm and pulling hard. “Stop! Don’t—“

Andrew shoved him roughly away.

Then he spoke.

“I need this one. He’s powerful. He has a strong bond. I will wake.”

“Goddamnit!” Jean shrieked, and grabbed Andrew’s arm, wrestling him backwards. He gritted his teeth, hauling him back down the steps. “Since when has demonic possession been a thing of yours, ass goblin!”

“The blood of a murderer  _ and _ a hero!” Andrew snarled, kicking him in the gut and darting back up the steps. “This one has both! More than enough to wake me!”

“Bullshit!” Jean yelled, ignoring his pulsing terror. “Andrew! Andrew, can you hear me? I know you’re still in there!”

Andrew curled his lip and broke into a run, and when Jean tried to pursue, he yanked out his gun and fired multiple shots at him.

Several ricocheted off Jean’s arm, doing little more than slowing him down. 

But one hit its mark.

Jean screamed and fell, mind-numbing agony flooding up his torso.

The bullet had hit him in the side.

Through the haze of pain, Jean knew that even with his abilities he wasn’t going to last long after getting shot between the ribs like this.

He gritted his teeth and forced himself back to his feet, letting out a guttural shout.

He couldn’t lose the one he loved. 

Not again.

“Andrew!” He screamed, filled with desperation. “Andrew! C’mon, listen to me, you asshole! Please!”

Andrew had made it to the top of the steps. He turned around, holding up his pistol, and then leveled it at his head with a cruel, very un-Andrew-like smirk.

That was when Jean lost hope.

Through the horrible pain in his gut, he could see Andrew’s face, wreathed in darkness, contorted into a terrifying grin that he never would’ve made in real life.

And he was badly wounded, unable to stop Mapleshade’s plot or save the person he loved from disappearing.

Again. 

With an exhausted groan of pain and grief, he stumbled and fell. 

Overwhelming sadness flooded in and quickly replaced his fear. He felt tears running down his cheeks.

He’d failed Andrew, who at this point was as good as dead.

“Do it,” he muttered, determined to die with defiance. “Do it if you’re not a coward, Mapleshade.”

He heard laughter.

“Oh, of course you’re giving up,” Andrew sneered. “You’re giving up and running away. That’s what you do best, isn’t it?”

Jean snarled in anger and pain.

“Kill me!” He spat. “You took him, and I know what you’ll do when you’re finished! Just put me out of my goddamn misery, you fucking coward!”

Andrew lowered his gun.

Jean didn’t bother to struggle when he reached down and ripped off his oxygen mask, and began to drag him up the steps by the arms, blinding pain slicing through him with each movement. 

He’d failed.

Again.


	41. Radiance

Jesse didn’t have time to send white fire at Leo.

A blast of energy hit him and knocked him to the ground, sending a horrible seeping cold through his limbs. 

The slavering maw of an enormous black lioness had him pinned on his back, snarling viciously in his ear, claws piercing his skin.

Jesse screamed and writhed frantically. 

He had to save Lukas.

Everyone was here to kill him.

“Let me go!” He howled.

He heard shouting, then screams and explosions, but the lioness on top of him was incredibly strong, with a massive paw on each of his shoulders.

Jesse finally couldn’t hold back.

He screamed. 

A massive blast of energy exploded outwards from his body, knocking the black lioness off him.

Jesse floundered back to his feet. With a shout, he launched a blast of energy in the general direction of where he’d last seen Leo.

Screams of terror and pain swelled around him.

Then someone tackled him around the waist, and the huge black lioness spread her wings and roared.

Jesse snarled and planted a foot in his assailant’s gut.

“Get  _ off!”  _ He shrieked.

Luke struggled back to his feet. To Jesse’s shock, purple lightning was flickering around the man’s body, and his eyes were glowing the same color.

_ He must be using Lion’s power. _

“Jesse, calm down!” Luke yelled.

Jesse suddenly felt another wave of incomprehensible terror crash into him. With a shout, he impulsively lashed out.

The man somehow caught the blast.

And before Jesse could blink, Luke was slamming a tire iron over his head. 

“Jesse, sit _ down!” _

Jesse cried out in pain, and, remembering how he’d accidentally burned Beau, he slammed both hands into Luke’s chest. 

Luke stumbled back, snarling.

There were hand-shaped burn holes in his bloody shirt, his skin sizzling. 

Before Luke could react, Jesse grabbed his arms and wrestled him to the ground, adrenaline heightening his power and amplifying Luke’s tortured screaming. 

He had to stop them, Jesse thought blindly, slamming Luke’s head against the melting asphalt. 

Then something broke through his blind rage.

_ “JESSE, STOP!” _

Jesse froze, his fire dying.

Then he saw his badly burned Luke’s torso was. His shirt was in charred tatters, barely clinging to his still sizzling skin.

The man let out a faint, agonized moan.

Jesse stared in shock and horror, slowly stepping back. 

His whole body was shaking. Holding down all this blind terror and the horrible chills was almost impossible.

“Jesse, it’s me,” a familiar voice said.

Jesse whirled around in fear, bringing up his sparking hands. 

Then he recognized her.

It was Phoebe, carefully approaching him with her hands up, a nervous look on her face.

She dropped her sword, carefully maintaining eye contact. 

“It’s okay,” she soothed. “We took care of Leo. He’s not here anymore. He ran away. It’s gonna be okay, just  _ please _ leave Luke alone.”

Jesse flinched, feeling his face twitch.

_ Leo was still alive? _

“Jesse, it’ll be okay,” Phoebe continued, slowly holding her hand out. “Here, just hold my hand. Nobody’s gonna hurt you.”

Jesse hesitated. 

Maybe she wasn’t lying. 

He forced the fire to dim until it was barely a warm glow.

He slowly reached out, getting ready to jerk away at any moment, but he suddenly felt a strange sense of calm as their hands touched.

“See?” Phoebe said gently and laced their fingers. “It’s okay. Nobody’s gonna hurt you, see?”

Then, without warning, the gas tank of an overturned car exploded.


	42. Lion’s Roar (Reprise)

Jesse only had a fuzzy recollection of what happened next.

The explosion. 

A scream, maybe his own.

Blinding light, terrible rumbling.

A massive explosion, even bigger than the last one.

Then silence. 

His consciousness slowly returned.

Groaning, Jesse hauled himself back to his feet. He was standing in a huge, blackened crater. All around him, the city was in ruins, car alarms going off in the distance. 

Horror filled him as he scrambled out of the crater, his arm hairs tingling with residual power. 

He could feel it swelling again, and he gritted his teeth and forced it down. 

“Nooo…” he mumbled. 

He began to stumble towards the charred body on the ground, barely recognizable. 

But on the body’s unrecognizable head were the remains of a bandanna, and a melted puddle of gold and warped, charred leather lay on the ground. 

No metal arm though, which narrowed it down to… 

Jesse crumpled next to the body. 

He began to sob, his whole body convulsing as he grabbed Phoebe’s charred hand, but the scorched flesh disintegrated and fell off the bones grotesquely. 

His sobbing just increased. 

“Nooo!” He howled, wrapping his arms around his head and wailing. 

Several remaining cars promptly exploded behind him in the rubble from the shockwave he accidentally sent out, which only made everything worse. 

It felt like something was grinding on the inside of his skull; thousands of tiny voices screaming at him from within. 

_ Jesse Jesse Jesse Jesse JESSE JESSE JESSE JESSE JESSE _

In desperation, his tears evaporating before they hit the ground, Jesse stumbled away. 

He finally collapsed in an empty alley. 

“MAKE IT STOP!” He wailed hysterically, clawing frantically at his head. “MAKE IT STOP OH PLEASE GOD MAKE IT STOP JUST STOP MAKE IT STOP!”

Energy exploded out of him again and again as he screamed, slowly losing what little sanity he still had as the surrounding buildings were blown away again and again. 

Finally his strength failed, and he collapsed, unconscious. 


	43. The Awakening

Jean let out a guttural shriek of pain as the dark-haired woman shoved something into his bullet wound.

“Mapleshade decides wants to kill you herself,” Arai huffed. “You can’t die yet.”

Jean clenched his teeth, stifling another scream as she dragged him upright and shoved him into a cage of some kind.

He didn’t have the strength to get back up, and he slumped against the bars.

This was pointless. 

He gazed numbly out at Mapleshade, who was still inhabiting Andrew’s body, currently pacing around the dais of blue crystal beneath the black spires.

“When will we begin?” She hissed, fiddling with Andrew’s belt.

“Calm down,” Arai muttered, rummaging through a crate. “I need to find the artifact. What did it look like again?”

Arai didn’t look particularly intimidating in her polished dark blue and green armor that looked vaguely familiar, but Jean knew appearances could be deceiving. She was shorter than he expected, and had brown skin and tangled black hair pinned out of her face with a red hair clip, her clear plastic oxygen mask making lines in her scarred cheeks. 

Jean inhaled shallowly, pain surging through his lungs.

The atmosphere was slowly killing him the longer he went without a mask. He had a feeling they were doing it on purpose to weaken him. 

But he’d stopped caring.

“Arai,” he muttered. “Why’re you working with her?”

Arai’s nose wrinkled.

“I messed up,” she snapped, slamming the crate shut. “I lost my family, I lost my friends, and my pet. Reuben didn’t deserve to die, and Mapleshade promised I could see him again if I helped her. I need to fix my mistakes, at any cost.”

Jean suddenly felt a cold, cold feeling deep in his gut. 

“You,” he gasped. “You’re me.”

“I know,” Arai growled. “I used to be called Jolene. But then I was renamed Arai by someone from a world I passed through, trying to find this one. It’s an Altean word.”

“Altean for  _ avenger,”  _ Jean murmured, something clicking in his brain. “Ah, and you’re wearing  _ Star Shield.  _ Not my favorite suit of armor.”

Arai scowled. “Do you really want me to have to gag you?”

Jean managed a wheezy laugh, meeting her eyes. “Nah,” he said. “But consider this a warning. Everything’ll inevitably go to hell if you work with Mapleshade, not matter how you play your cards. She’s a master at psychological manipulation, and believe me, I would know because she turned me into a mindless killing machine for a while. I’m telling you, you’re fucked. I can help you get out of this situation you put yourself in.”

Arai’s lip curled.

“Shut up,” she snapped. “I don’t care. She promised me.”

Jean smirked, wincing as his lungs heaved. “Okay,” he said hoarsely. “Don’t get pissed at me when she inevitably double-crosses and kills you.”

Arai huffed in annoyance and stalked away, holding a strange crystal ball in her hands. 

Jean coughed. 

He licked his lips, tasting blood. 

He groaned in pain. It hurt to breathe.

Well, if he died now, at least he wouldn’t be stuck in his cycle of anger and depression and self-destruction after this all ended.

Black spots danced across his vision.

“I have the primal stone,” Arai said, holding up the perfect sphere of blue crystal.

“Good,” Mapleshade said. It was terrifying to hear her words in Andrew’s voice. “Set it on the dais. You’ll see what happens.”

Arai obliged. 

Jean watched as she set the orb on the dais, and then gasped as it began to glow with an otherworldly blue light.

Then a door on the floor of the dais slid open, and a polished silver sarcophagus slid out, blue runes flickering across the sides. Mapleshade tore off Andrew’s mask and climbed inside, and the sarcophagus shut behind her.

The whole thing started to glow, and screams,  _ Andrew’s  _ screams, echoed through the air.

Jean suddenly gasped. 

Images flashed across his vision. He realized it must’ve been Andrew’s memories.

Sitting by an acid lake, throwing rocks at it with Lee.

Paige throwing a brick at his face.

Running down the street.

Running on a track.

Firing a gun.

Stumbling through a blizzard, carrying a limp body in his arms.

May laughing.

Gill knocking back a shot.

Isa hugging him.

And then his own face staring back at him, a soft smile on it.

And then it was gone.

“No!” Jean yelled, ignoring the pain as he threw himself at the bars of his cage.

He gritted his teeth, summoning every last ounce of strength and reaching for the Red Lion, until he finally screamed in frustration and punched the bars. 

The cage exploded from the shockwave created by the sheer force of his will. 

Jean felt his sword shoot into his hand as he lunged forward.

He slashed the sarcophagus open.

Andrew toppled out, eyes glowing blue, his clothes smoldering. Behind him, the silver sarcophagus disintegrated into ash.

“Andrew!” Jean yelled, forgetting about Arai, forgetting about the searing pain in his side and his rapidly deteriorating lungs. He ran to Andrew and dropped down next to him, and almost sobbed with relief when he felt his pulse drumming steadily against his palm. 

Jean grabbed his mask off the box Arai had left it on and put it on him, gently massaging his chest.

“Please be okay,” he mumbled. 

The front of the mask began to fog up with Andrew’s breath.

Jean let out a sigh of relief. 

Then he coughed violently, and spat blood on the ground.

And then he heard the voice.

The voice he heard in his nightmares. 

The voice he’d hoped he’d never have to hear outside of said nightmares again.

“My, my, my,” Mapleshade purred, polishing her fingernails on her loose black shirt. “Look what we have here.”


	44. A Phoenix Rises

Jean was paralyzed with terror.

But Andrew was alive. How in the hell was she standing there?

Then he got his answer as the choking blackish-blue shadows that shrouded the dais converged into the smoky form of a dark phoenix the size of a Sherman tank, blue fire flickering around its tail and wings and spilling out from its eyes. 

Mapleshade herself looked odd. Her face had strange dark patches, as did her arms, and her left eye was jet-black her pupil glowing blue. Other than that, she looked exactly the same as she had three years ago; a tall, muscular woman of about thirty years old with a curly mess of unruly white-and-orange-streaked hair and a scarred face.

The phoenix clacked its beak and shrieked, spilling flames on the ground. 

Jean reminded himself to breathe.

“You’ve let yourself go,” he growled, his hand tightening on his sword’s hilt.

“Hardly,” Mapleshade sneered. “Your efforts were surprisingly effective. I can’t contain all my power in my new body, but I  _ can _ contain it in the phoenix. And I kept telling you I’d rise.”

“What do you  _ want?”  _ Jean spat, his voice shaking as his bullet wound sent another stab of pain through him.

His lungs seized up again and he coughed painfully. 

He needed clean air, and soon.

“What do  _ I  _ want?” Mapleshade laughed coldly, waving her hand. “No one  _ cares _ what I want. So I’m coming back to get it myself.”

Jean gritted his teeth. He knew how much violence and terror and horrific deeds that had been carried out by the owner of that demure expression. 

How many good souls had been manipulated to darkness. 

“Back off!” He snarled.

Even though he knew it was fruitless, he had to at least wound her, slow her down a bit to give the others time.

He wasn’t going down without a fight.

Mapleshade let out a wry chuckle and merely flicked her hand.

Jean shrieked in agony as his wounds suddenly throbbed like someone was digging a hot knife into them. He collapsed to the ground, convulsing as invisible needles stabbed the insides of his lungs and a nonexistent blade sank into his bullet wound.

He couldn’t think.

He could hardly see.

The pain was so horrible.

Somewhere through the haze, Mapleshade continued to speak.

“What a shame,” she murmured icily. “It really is. You could have had everything you wanted, Jean. All the power, anything. But you went and squandered what I tried to give you.”

She grabbed his sword off the ground and casually snapped it in half. 

Jean howled in pain, writhing in agony as intangible knives sliced through his flesh. 

It was too much.

His consciousness was fading.

“You even killed me a second time, you insolent little kit,” Mapleshade snarled. “And now, I intend to make you suffer. I intend to kill you slowly and watch you feel the pain I went through, having my mate turn on me, losing my children, the  _ injustice _ of being thrown out, and what your Aidan did to me when I tried to go back home. And your little friend… ah, his name is Jesse. I’ve been having  _ such  _ fun, messing with his head and corrupting his power! But alas, you, Jean Orion, will—“

There was suddenly a violent roar, an earsplitting shriek _ _ and then the pain was suddenly gone. 

Jean gasped and bolted upright. Then he coughed violently and crumpled.

Well, that horrible, mind-numbing agony with no particular source was gone, but there was still the matter of his lungs. He was too exhausted and delirious from the painful throbbing of his bullet wound and a lack of oxygen to wonder why Mapleshade wasn’t still torturing him.

Then a mask clamped over his mouth and nose.

Jean gasped, the fog in his brain clearing a bit as he inhaled deeply and fell on his side, groaning. 

He glanced up, and growled in frustration. 

It was  _ Arai. _

“You’re not allowed to die yet,” she hissed, wrestling his arms back.

Jean let out a guttural snarl and, ignoring the pain, elbowed her as hard as he could in the face.

There was a snarl and a nasty crunch from behind him.

Jean spun around.

In a blaze of blue light, Andrew was parrying blows from Mapleshade’s scimitar with a gleaming spear that looked like it was made of frost. He was holding his own, amazingly, even with only one arm, and Jean couldn’t help but let out a cheer as Andrew managed to land a blow on her leg. 

Above them, in a terrifying display of colliding power, a glowing blue winged lioness battled a shadowy phoenix. Claws were flashing, teeth snapping, a cacophony of roars and shrieks echoing loudly above them, and instead of blood spraying from wounds, streaks of light bled from gashes and cuts.

Jean had heard the term  _ fur flying  _ before, but he’d never thought about how horrific it really was.

  
  
The two beasts were literally trying to tear each other apart.

Then Arai’s sword was swishing through the air towards him, and Jean spun around and blocked it with his metal arm just in time.

“Listen!” He hissed, gritting his teeth against the pain and blocking another blow. “Mapleshade is  _ using  _ you! The first chance she gets, she’s either gonna kill you or get rid of you another way!”

There was a wild look in Arai’s eyes.

“I don’t fucking care! I want my family back and I’m willing to do what it takes to save them, asshole!” 

Jean winced. 

He’d felt things like that.

“Look, I’ve been there!” He snarled, grabbing her sword and disarming her. “I know it’s shitty but you can’t keep trying to go back! You have to move on!”

He screamed in pain as Arai punched him hard in the gut.

And then they were on the ground, punching and kicking and trying to get the upper hand, but they were clearly an equal match.

And Jean was getting tired.

Then Andrew screamed in the distance, and Jean gasped in horror when he saw a battered Mapleshade furiously slash her scimitar down towards Andrew’s exposed chest.

Everything seemed to slow down.

Jean didn’t hear himself snarl in rage or sense himself thrust his hand out.

Mapleshade’s scimitar halted midair only centimeters from Andrew, who looked very startled.

“No!” Mapleshade shrieked.

Jean grinned, feeling power thrumming in his heart.

“Hell fuckin’ yes,” he growled as Andrew scrambled back to his feet and met his eyes, smiling.

Jean knew what he had to do.

He took Andrew’s hand.

Mapleshade looked horrified.

“No!” She hissed. “You can’t—“

“Fucking watch us,” Jean snarled, relishing Mapleshade’s shocked choking noise.

“Sunshine’s right,” Andrew added. “We aren’t fighting anymore today.”

And then their combined power hit critical mass, and in a deafening scream of energy and thunder, the top of the obsidian mountain exploded. 


	45. Leo, As In Lion

Jesse woke at dusk.

He figured it was dusk, since the sun was low in the sky.

It was hard to tell.

He groaned. His body ached like he’d just run a marathon, and he felt so cold he was probably going to freeze when the sun went down. 

He glanced around the ruins and shivered, blowing on his hands. 

Then he heard rocks scattering.

He let out a strangled squeak and whipped around, blasting white fire at the source, blowing the crumbled chunk of brick wall to bits.

Then he heard it again.

Jesse yelped and accidentally melted the wreckage of a car in half.

He gritted his teeth, forcing the pulsing fire in his veins to cool, as well as his spiking body temperature.

Too hot, too cold. Nothing in between.

Then he heard a familiar voice.

“Wh… whaa…”

Suddenly struck by curiosity, Jesse peered around a still-burning truck.

Lying in the dirt, eyes still glowing bright green, was a young man Jesse didn’t recognize with tangled bleach-blond hair and huge scars all over his face. There was a large, green winged lioness crouching next to him, licking blood from a cut on his cheek.

The man looked alarmed, to say the least, and even though Jesse’s memory was murky, he looked vaguely familiar.

“Shoo!” Jesse blurted, waving his glowing hands at the lioness.

She growled and flew away.

“Fuck, that went badly,” The man muttered (likely to himself), the green glow receding from his eyes, which turned out to be a pretty shade of green-blue. “It has been one _hell_ of a week. Jesse went supernova, Mapleshade teleported me out of there and then kicked my ass for letting them escape, then threw me back out here… wait… AAAAAAH!”

As soon as the man saw Jesse, terror spread across his face and he floundered backwards, shrieking.

Startled, Jesse leapt backwards as well, and sent fire at the scarred man.

When the flames dissipated, Jesse was suddenly struck by terror. Had he  _ killed  _ the guy?  


No, he was lowering a charred shield, looking even more alarmed.

“Please don’t kill me,” the guy squeaked, dropping his now broken shield. “I just almost got killed by my boss for messing up an assignment, and—“

“Green lion,” Jesse mumbled. “That’s it, you’re a green channeler.”

It definitely made sense; the glowing eyes and the giant winged lioness and the magic he’d sensed.

The man grimaced. “Jesus, you almost burned my hair off.”

Jesse laughed weakly, shivering at the freezing wind as he forced his fire back down and dulled the searing heat in his right hand, then offered it to the man.

“I’m Jesse,” he said through chattering teeth. “Who’re you?”

The man’s eyes narrowed.

“Leo,” he said, taking his hand and regaining his footing. “Yeah, you can help me, actually.”

———

“Who’s that?” Jesse asked, tapping the photo. He immediately regretted it when his finger burned a hole through the paper.

Leo quickly swatted out the flame. “It’s someone we need to capture. Her name is Petra Grace Wright, and she’s a very dangerous escaped criminal. Technically I don’t have  _ real _ orders to go out, but if it’ll prove to the Bird that I can still be commander, I’m gonna try to catch her.”

Jesse frowned. The red-haired woman with a lighting bolt-shaped scar and a metal right hand wearing red and black leather jacket and an enthusiastic expression also looked familiar.

Curse his blurry memory.

“So what do we do?” He asked, straining to hold down his excitement, which was sending sparks popping down his arms.

He wasn’t sure what was going on, but he was excited for whatever it was.

“Well,” Leo said. “First of all, we need to rest. We need to be ready, because Petra’s a slippery little bastard and we need to have our wits about us. Then we head to another reality tomorrow.”

Jesse gasped. “Another reality?”

Leo winced. “Wow, your memory  _ is _ fucked up. Yeah. I’ll explain later. Right now, you need to get some rest. And, uh, I noticed you were shivering. Do you want a blanket?”

Jesse nodded vigorously, and gratefully took the blanket Leo gave him.

Thankfully it seemed to be fireproof. 

As he curled up in a corner in a small alley they found to rest in, Jesse mulled over his thoughts about Leo, who had started a small fire to keep warm.

Jesse edged closer, still cold, even with his blanket.

To his surprise, Leo, who seemed grumpy and irritated by the cold, didn’t seem to mind when he settled right next to the coals, finally satisfied. 

Leo actually seemed quite nice, Jesse thought as he drifted off to sleep.

But he really reminded him of somebody, and Jesse just couldn’t quite put his finger on who.


	46. WindClan’s Trusted Warriors

Jesse watched intently as Leo rapped his knuckles on the door of the small, rickety house with a battered helicopter parked nearby.

“Who’s here?” Jesse asked, glancing down at the rough grass withering and crumbling into ash by his feet.

He experimentally laid a hand on the trunk of the tree next to the porch.

The wood smoked, and Jesse drew his hand away, staring in surprise at the handprint burned through the bark and an inch into solid wood.

Then the door opened.

It was a heavily pregnant young woman with greyish-blonde hair, which was odd considering she looked barely older than twenty-one. 

She took one look at Leo and scowled.

“What’re  _ you  _ doing here?” She huffed, narrowing her eyes. 

“Hi Heathertail,” Leo said nonchalantly, sticking his hands in his pockets. “This is my friend Jesse. Is Breezepelt home?”

“No,” she huffed. “He’s our hunting.”

“We can wait,” Leo said. “You mind making lunch? I can help.”

———

It was an awkward half hour before Breezepelt finally showed up.

Jesse actually remembered  _ him,  _ even though it was vague. Something about jumping out of a helicopter onto a moving train, and then—

“You want some rabbit stew?” Leo asked, passing him a bowl.

Jesse carefully accepted it.

Leo was confusing. He reminded Jesse of  _ someone,  _ but he couldn’t remember who. Something about his blond hair and leather jacket felt familiar, but his cold green eyes and scarred face just had a  _ wrong  _ feeling.

Something wasn’t quite right.

He shivered. Why did it always have to be this cold, even inside?

“Why’s Heathertail so pregnant?” Jesse asked. “I mean, she looks so young, and she definitely can’t be older than me.”

“It’s a Feli thing,” Leo said. “In their society it’s considered lucky if you live past sixty. Average life expectancy is about that, so it’s perfectly normal for the mollies to have kittens when they’re young. Heathertail is… twenty-three, I think, which actually puts her a year or so older than the average.”

“Hm,” Jesse murmured. 

Just then, a very pregnant tawny cat slipped through a hole in the base of the kitchen door and waddled up to one of the open seats. Reality seemed to bend around its body, reforming into that of Heathertail.

Jesse blinked.

She was a shapeshifter?

“Breezepelt is on his way back,” Heathertail said, pouring stew into her bowl. “What’s going on this time?”

Leo sighed. “Petra, that’s what. She knows about the portal. We gotta catch her, and Breezepelt knows which reality is hers. We need to borrow his quantum tracker.”

Heathertail frowned.

“You’re not trying to get the Clans involved in this, are you?”

Leo shook his head.

Jesse flinched at the name  _ Petra. _

He wasn’t sure why, but for some reason it made him feel a stab of guilt. He had a vague idea of what she looked like, but aside from sadness and a fiery temper, he couldn’t remember anything about her at all, which was disconcerting. 

He knew they’d been close, once.

Then the door opened.

Jesse recognized the man who entered the room right away: Tall, slender and dark-skinned, with strange golden eyes and a permanent scowl.

“Hi,” he said nervously.

Breezepelt narrowed his eyes. “You’re telling me he…”

“Defected,” Leo said quickly.

Awkward silence.

“What do you mean, I defected?” Jesse demanded, trying to force his fire to stay cold, but he smelled burning metal and looked down to see his spoon glowing orange and melting in his hand.

A very startled expression appeared on Breezepelt’s face.

“Have you always been able to do that?”

“I don’t know,” Jesse sighed, watching the metal dripping and landing in his stew. “Something happened in Anchorage, but I don’t really remember.”

He missed his friends, or rather, the vague recollections he had of them.

Breezepelt huffed. “You can use my tracker,” he relented. “Just tell the Bird my cover’s almost been compromised lately and I have to lie low for a while, and Heathertail is due any day now, so I can’t exactly leave. And yeah, I know the Bird’s back, and frankly I don’t like it.”

Leo scowled, taking the small wooden box off the table. “I could arrest you for treason just for saying that.”

Breezepelt rolled his eyes. “Whatever.”

Leo scoffed. “I’m kidding. C’mon, Jesse.”

Jesse got up, wincing when he saw the burn marks on the wooden chair.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Your stuff—“

“Don’t worry about it,” Heathertail said gently, taking the mangled spoon out of his bowl. “We can always make more.”

And with that, Jesse followed Leo out the door.

Outside, Leo was standing out in the open, tapping on a small device in his hand that looked like a cellphone.

“Gimme a minute,” Leo said. “Oh, wait, I got it. We’re going to Petra’s reality to see where she went. Do you remember if you have a time dial?”

That Jesse did remember. 

“Yeah,” he said.

“Good,” Leo said, and opened a portal.

Jesse took a deep breath.

He felt a strange sense of deja vu.

He _knew_ this. All of this felt familiar, but he couldn’t put any concrete memories behind it. His mind was a jumbled mess, and he couldn’t tell what was... well, real.

But he ignored the doubts swirling around in his head. He had a mission to complete, with help from his strange new friend.

Jesse squared his shoulders, and followed Leo into the unknown.


	47. Bad, Bad News

Jean woke up in a hospital bed. 

Every part of his body hurt. 

Then he saw Petra, covered in bandages, sitting in a nearby chair. 

“What’s going on?” Jean muttered. “Why am I not on the  _ Falcon,  _ and oh, shit, where the hell is Andrew?”

He flinched as the battle came back to him; the explosion, the screaming. 

Then unconsciousness. 

“Andrew’s okay,” Petra said. “He’s asleep, but he’s stable, don’t worry.”

Jean groaned in relief. 

“Damn, you look like you’ve been through hell,” he grumbled, wincing at the blood seeping through Petra’s bandages. “Is everybody else okay? What happened?”

Petra cringed. 

“Well,” she sighed, her neutral expression quickly darkening. “We kinda got captured. Something happened to Jesse, and we’re not sure if he’s still alive. Beau barely managed to turn their spear on and teleport us out of there in time, but…”

Jean froze in terror.

“Please tell me at least that Phoebe’s okay,” he pleaded, even though the horrible, sickening feeling in his gut was already giving him his answer. 

Petra’s face fell.

“Jean,” she said quietly. “I am so sorry.”

  
  


_ To be continued  _


	48. Miscellaneous Writings (Part 1)

A letter written on a datapad found in Jean’s pocket after he snuck out of the hospital approximately three hours after emerging from his coma:

_ Ok im drunk but hear me out _

_ So phoebe dying made me think _

_ I need to say a lot of things to you that if I die sooon I cant tell you so pleas listen so I can sya them _

_ Andrew you are the best tHing tht ever happned to me _

_ I love you  _

_ I love you more than anything but you look at yourself with disgust because of what pama did to you _

_ You are nOt theirs you are your own person and I love your face and I love your smile and I love your laugh and I love your voice and wvrythng abuot you is beautiful beond reason and you are butefull inside & out _

_ Yuor so beuteful Aphrodite adn Eros would bend their heads in shame _

_ When I kiss you I feel happyer than I have in years but you always are sad and I wnant you to feel good!! _

_ I want to make love to you under the night sky you never got to expereence so I can see the stars reflecting in your eyes and the moonlight shining on your skin and turning your scars into a beautiful patchwork of stories that we don’t have to tell. So I can run my hands through your hair and kiss you and touch you and make you feel as good as you make me when were together  _

_ I love you andrew I love you and I never want to loose you _

_ I had to say this all beforree somthingng comes and kills us so please dont get mad at me _

_ I would fight the stars for you _

_ I would turn myself over to Mapleshade if it meant saving you  _

_ If something gos rong and I die I needd yuo to nkow that I really love you and I need you to stay alive for me ok???? _

_ I love you  _

_ jean Scott orionmmnhfxgfsfffffff _

  
  
  
  


A note scribbled on a napkin in the bottom of Takashi Shirogane-Skywalker’s filing cabinet:

_ Shiro, I found something important yesterday. I know you’ve been telling me it’s time I retire, but this is too dangerous for anyone but me to handle. Something evil we thought we managed to stop is waking up, and there’s something happening to the universe. I might be gone a while. Please take care of yourself. _

_ I love you always, _

_ —LS-S _

  
  
  
  


A transcript of an abandoned starship found on the planet Earth in Reality #4457930097:

Captain: Check the radiation levels again. Is the planet still too toxic to land on?

First Mate: Yes, sir. How the humans managed to live in it, we have no idea. 

Captain: Land anyway.

First Mate: But sir, I just said—

Captain: We have orders from the Bird to land here. Do you want to see what she’ll do if we disobey?

First Mate: No sir.

[SHIP LANDS]

Captain: Send a squad out. See if they can find the Blue Channeler that woke up on this planet. [SIGH] Maybe I’ll finally get that damn promotion.

[SQUAD EXITS THE SHIP]

[APPROX. FIVE MINUTES OF RADIO SILENCE]

First Mate: We’re detecting life forms in the area, sir. We can’t tell what they are because the radiation is messing with the sensors. Should we proceed?

[LOUD BANGING SOUND ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE HULL

Captain: What was that?

[MUFFLED SCREAMING AND CRASHING FROM OUTSIDE, SOUNDS OF WEAPONS FIRING]

First Mate: Sir, there’s something attacking us! Lots of somethings!

Captain: Collection Squad leader, do you read me?

[STATIC]

[RADIO SILENCE FROM COLLECTION SQUAD]

[SOFT SCRAPING SOUNDS]

First Mate: Can you hear—

[LOUD ANIMAL-LIKE SCREAM]

[SCREAMING, CRASHING, SOUNDS OF TEARING METAL]

Captain: No! No! [GRUNTS] Fuck, get off my ship!

[SOUNDS OF BLOWS]

[HYSTERICAL SCREAMING FROM FIRST MATE]

[ANIMAL-LIKE HOWLING]

[GUNFIRE, SOUNDS OF TEARING FLESH, AGONIZED SCREAMS]

[STATIC]

{end of transcript}

  
  
  
  


A legal document found in Red’s files in the high security vault in the Garrison Headquarters:

(Day 03 of solitary confinement) Subject is still responding negatively to any outside contact; lashed out at the guard bringing her food. Still seems to lack higher reasoning and shows extreme aggression, losing fine motor control in prosthesis. Results still inconclusive as to whether or not subject will successfully recover. 

Court has reasoned solitary confinement will be extended as necessary. Admiral Skywalker and Commander McClain been scheduled to visit subject in following week.

As for testing, tactics for biological methods of mind control have been inconclusive. Evidence of mind control still not present.

Commanders Kogane and Serrano rule against the subject’s solitary confinement. Restrict their legal abilities if necessary. The safety of the public is higher than the subject. Terminate her if a permanent mental collapse occurs; contact Arc—[further text is illegible due to torn paper]

  
  
  
  


A letter found on the table in the back room of Beau’s record shop:

Listen, there isn’t much time, but I know you’ll understand. I’m still alive, and currently in hiding. Tell Jean, when you meet him, that I can help get rid of tangents. You’ll know who he is when you meet him. Bring him to me. He’s in great danger, and if you value your life, you’ll do as I tell you. I know we haven’t talked in a while, but on the off chance I survive when the Bird wakes up, I will help you get rid of her.

Yours, Snowtuft

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this bullshit idea that literally no one asked for is being expanded into two parts now!! Molotov Cocktails for Two will start having chapters posted hopefully in the next few weeks.
> 
> Enjoy!


End file.
